Peanuts February 19, 1953



Just had to share one of my all-time favourite Peanuts Strips. This one hails from 1953 when the strip was still in its (relative) infancy. For the first time, we see a glimpse of the psychoanalyst that Lucy Van Pelt will become in later strips. (Though we're still a few years off her offering psychiatric help for the sum of five cents from a small, stand in the Van Pelt's front yard.) 

In many ways the resident bitch of the Peanuts gang (or crabby as she was known in the strips,) Lucy had the uncanny ability to accurately and bluntly point out everyone else's problems and failings, while remaining oblivious to her own--of which there were many. Lucy could never resist pulling the football away from Charlie Brown for no other reason than pure malevolence, could be cruel to her younger brothers Linus and Rerun simply because they existed and remained insensitive to the fact that Schroeder, the unlikely object of her affections, was simply not interested. Lucy probably had a higher level of self-esteem than the rest of the gang, thanks in part to her level of insensitivity. It was, quite simply, impossible to insult her.

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