I Prefer My "Peanuts" A Little Bit Schulz-y

Never read comic strips as a kid. Even by early 2000’s standards newspaper must have been going the way of the dodo. My parents certainly never subscribed to any newsies, so this whole comic strip business is alien to me. I know what a comic strip is. I recognize most of the famous ones, but I’ve never taken the time to read their origins.
Peanuts. A comic strip if ever there has been one. Watched the specials as a child, but I never read a single Peanuts strip till this semester, so going in I wasn’t sure what to expect - and boy  was I missing out. I never realized how much I loved The Peanuts till I started reading the earliest comics. It wasn’t like The Peanuts I grew up to know. Early Peanuts still had Charlie Brown, Lucy, Schroeder, Snoopy, Linus, but none of them had their iconic designs, all of their quirks (like Linus) were in their infancy and such. Seeing their first incarnations was refreshing to say the least.  I like seeing Charlie Brown fly and missing a kick as much as the next guy, but that joke is a part of my issue with comics.
My biggest problem with long running comics is the feeling over time that the original creator loses more steam each and every year, as they have to start scraping their most boring, generic jokes just to reach a deadline. Early Peanuts takes place in a time before Peanuts had the worldwide recognition it has today. Watching Schulz form an identity for his story is more rewarding than I was expecting. Of course, not every joke in the comic lands, but early Peanuts seems to feature a lot more hits than misses.
The thing that really brings it over the edge into hilarity for me though are the relatability of some of its jokes and the facial expressions that often serve as the punchlines to end off the strip. From what I’ve read of the later comics expressions are at the forefront of The Peanuts humor. However the way the comics go about it even by the 70’s feels stale. Characters basically have one expression for punchlines. You know the one. Where the face is doing a kinda worried/blank/feeling down on your luck kind of look. It is the definitive face of the Peanuts. Now let’s go back to February 11th, 1954, and look at that day’s issue of the Peanuts. It starts off simple, girl talks about how she wants to be a nurse when she grows up, asks Charlie Brown what he wants to be and he responds with “perfect”. Needless to say I was on the floor by the end of the strip. I think it is the combination of Charlie’s straight face, implying his dead seriousness with his answer, coupled with the girls expression, which goes from a large grin in the first three panels to a blank expression in final one, and it really adds a lot to the strips’ punchline. That strip, along with many others are why I hold the comic in such a high regard.