"How I hate him!" (well, maybe not)

I went to look at the daily Peanuts comic strip online (the new year has brought the 1968 strips into play), and noticed a surprise. The comics site has now also started a feature called "Peanuts Begins" (which did make me think of how older Dilbert strips can be found online), making a point of this being the sixty-fifth anniversary of Peanuts. Even for someone who has all the "Complete Peanuts" books, the fairly famous first strip being coloured got my attention; beyond Charlie Brown's initial featureless T-shirt being golden yellow instead of the "white" that seemed to have stuck in my own mind, the "antique" colours of sky and landscape are also sort of intriguing.

I did reflect a bit on the beginning of the strip, where Shermy was "the boy" and Patty was "the girl," with Charlie Brown as "the little guy" and Snoopy at times more the neighbourhood puppy than anyone's dog. How long this will be kept up does leave me wondering a bit (given the strip started in October, eventually the seasons will get out of sync), but it would be nice for the effort to get to 1952, when for me the characters will have grown past an odd initial sense of them looking sort of "half-finished" to "really kind of cute."