Look at that last panel. Snoopy with a machine gun. Now, this does somewhat play into his whole WWI flying ace sequences a bit and, by 1963 when this strip first ran, Snoopy had been reasonably well-established as having quite a few human attributes. No, here's the part that find disturbing...Snoopy is pointing the gun at Charlie Brown's house, not away from it as if to guard against possible intruders.
Charlie Brown is always, always shown entering and exiting from the left side of the panel when he's walking back and forth from his house to Snoopy's. Charlie Brown's house is on the left, Snoopy's doghouse is on the right. That's how it was done in the comics, that's how it was done in the cartoons...
Now I'm not one to question Charles Schulz's motivation for doing something like this, or what might've been going through his subconscious at the time, I'm just saying that Snoopy's house is always shown to the right of Charlie Brown's. Which means that Snoopy's machine gun is pointed right at Charlie Brown's house. Maybe he's got it trained on Linus, as he is something of an intruder. Maybe this is why we've never actually seen any parents in the Brown household. Maybe this is the reason why Sally isn't in the strip. Maybe Snoopy is holding Charlie Brown's baseball gear hostage.
All I'm saying here is that something really sinister is going on in what most people generally dismiss as a kids' comic.
1 comments:
One nuance, though... we can see the mouth of the barrel of the machine gun, meaning it isn't pointed straight left. It's diagonal left, left and a bit to the front. So maybe Snoopy's covering the space between Charlie Brown's house and the next-door neighbour? Maybe even a gate to the back yard (although it seems unlikely to me that there would be a fence; his interactions with World War II would be blocked by it)?
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