1952 was quite the year.
Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom. Ann Davison became the first woman to sail single-handedly across the Atlantic. John Cage’s 4’33″ received its first performance, as did Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. The UK announced and tested an atomic bomb.
Douglas Adams was born.
But possibly the most far-reaching and momentous occurrence of the year took place on 16th November. Somewhere in America, in an occasion marked on newspaper pages all over the country, a little round-headed kid tried to kick a football.
He failed.
It was not the first time he had failed. Towards the end of the previous year his determined run up (tongue peeking up and out of the corner of his mouth in what would become Charles M Schulz’s trademark method of denoting concentration) was thwarted by a dark-haired girl’s fear of injury (“He’ll kick my hand – I know he will!”). On that occasion the dark-haired girl was Violet, already established as one of the ‘straight guys’ of Peanuts. But when another dark-haired girl made her debut in early March 1952, Schulz quickly found he had a character ready made to be Charlie Brown’s tormentor-in-chief.
Lucy van Pelt was a wide-eyed little girl – the eyes in the early strips were drawn as small dots inside circles, a disconcerting effect that Schulz quickly abandoned in favour of a small-dot-plus-semicircle technique that made her look less deranged. But her innocent appearance hid a manipulative streak a mile wide. It manifested itself immediately.
“I’ve been hypnotised”, says Charlie Brown as he succumbs to her saccharine pleading and tramps off to get her a glass of water. Similar scenes are dotted through Lucy’s early appearances, during which she also makes the transition away from toddlerdom – she remains younger than Charlie Brown and the others, but gradually the difference becomes less marked, and by the end of the year the ‘baby’ role is taken by another new introduction, Lucy’s younger brother Linus. The main cast, the strip’s heart for nearly half a century, is assembling.
The major development in 1952, from Schulz’s point of view, was the addition of Sunday strips – eight panels instead of the usual four, allowing him to develop and experiment and flex his cartooning muscles. The storylines of these strips, such as they were, didn’t develop much more than the four-panel strips. They sometimes amount to little more than the kids noodling around in a heartwarming kind of way, with a payoff that elicits nothing more than a smile. But there’s pleasure to be had in just seeing the kids hanging out together, and the slow evolution of Schulz’s style, the growth in assurance which in turn enabled him to give freer rein to his imagination. The strip that appeared on Sunday 14th September, in which Lucy ‘walks on air’, is not only weird and funny, but also shows Schulz’s increasing confidence in delivering a gag. Lucy’s inevitable falling happens off-screen. We know it’s going to happen, and he portrays it with a big ‘THUMP’, but it’s all the more effective for not being seen.
There is experimentation elsewhere, too. Schroeder says the German name of a piano piece in Gothic script; Lucy is called to dinner while bouncing a ball, and the ball stays behind, bouncing all the while, motion lines and all; Schroeder muses “sometimes I think I should put in a transfer to a new comic strip” – an unusual (for Schulz) piece of meta-reference.
And then there’s Snoopy.
He’s still a dog, doing dog things – although there is a nice episode in which he is demonstrably underwhelmed by the idea of fetching a ball. But there are glimpses of the future. In one Sunday strip we see the first glimmerings of the whirlwind-feet dancing that would become one of his many trademarks. Having entertained the children, and served his purpose as far as they’re concerned, he retires to his dog house, disillusioned by their indifference. “I can always sit home and watch television”. And the dog house has a TV aerial.
But one of the strips that points most clearly to the future is also one of the strangest. We see Snoopy, standing on his hind legs and wearing what seem to be pinstriped dungarees, bossing Charlie Brown around, making him crawl on all fours, sit up, chase the ball. It’s a dream, of course, but gives us a tantalising (if weird) glimpse of the future dog-but-not-a-dog whose imagination and character made him so famous (“here’s the world famous comic strip canine…”).
Another sign of growing confidence is the appearance of the first sequence – a series of strips telling a story over several days, rather than the self-contained standalones with which he’d established himself. This one involves Lucy beating Charlie Brown at checkers. Three thousand times in a row. And when he does win, it’s only because she let him. Life’s not fair and Charlie Brown is a loser. Fair enough. But now he has a foil, off whom he would bounce – agonisingly, desperately – for nearly half a century. The antagonism between them shows more depth and potential in these early strips than had ever been apparent in Charlie Brown’s relationship with Patty or Violet.
And so to the football.
Charlie Brown runs up. Lucy pulls the ball away, leaving Charlie Brown to swing up into the air and back down to earth with a huge WHOMP. It’s a pattern he would revisit time and time and time again.
Lucy’s excuse is plausibility itself. “I was afraid your shoes might be dirty… I don’t want anyone with dirty shoes kicking my new football.”
In future strips, when Lucy’s thwarting of Charlie Brown’s ambitions is more calculated, that’s where it generally ends. But here there’s a follow-up. And it does, in the strictest sense, see Charlie Brown kick the football – by which I mean that his foot makes contact with the ball. The only trouble is that the ball doesn’t go anywhere, because he’s asked Lucy to hold it tight. She does so. Of course she does. And then, as he lies there in physical and spiritual agony, she tells him so. Butter wouldn’t melt.
“I’m not going to get up – I’m going to lie here for the rest of the day.”
I know how he feels.