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krpalmerTime for something more cheerful. I bought the latest volume of the Complete Peanuts series a little while ago, and as usual took my time reading through it. I had mentioned how I'd been looking forward to this particular volume for a while now, and just as I'd hoped there were plenty of interesting moments (and a few surprises) along the way.
The volume started off with the resolution of a "cliffhanger" where Charlie Brown had been putting off and putting off reading "Gulliver's Travels" and writing a book report about it. Of course, I'd seen that particular storyline before in an earlier reprint book, which continued, along with another one of the first reprint books my family had, to make much of the beginning of this volume familiar. Mixed in to two familiar storylines, though, were comic strips that hadn't been collected before, adding new details to Snoopy trying to romance an (unseen) girl beagle he meets at a skating patch and Linus's security blanket developing a life of its own to creep after and throw itself on Lucy. At one point, it shapes one end into a hand to shake and make up with her, only to then toss her over Linus's head... I once read in a biography of Charles M. Schulz that he had thought of a sequence where the blanket chased everyone in the cast, only to have his syndicate reject it in a rare move. If true, of course, that might have made the blanket a little too monstrous, but the sequence as it exists is kind of fun to me and a prelude to the increasing amount of fantasy worked into the strip.
I had also read about one Sunday page before, where Charlie Brown winds up in a phone booth at the end giving its phone number, in a book written by the producer of the Peanuts television specials Lee Mendelson. It turns out that Charlie Brown gave Meldelson's number... From the date of the strip, though, I can imagine Schulz being in constant phone contact with Mendelson working out the details for "A Charlie Brown Christmas," so it's not surprising to me that the number wound up being written in by accident.
One thing I did begin wondering about as I read through 1965's strips was if Peanuts had begun to focus still further on its "Big Four" characters, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus, to the increased exclusion of everyone else. Even an old reliable like Schroeder seemed diminished. Sally did have a few storylines, including one where she struggles with the "New Math" (complaining, as she'd done before, that all she wanted to be was a housewife; I can wonder if this began to seem a little dated in thinking ahead to later strips where she's just plain lazy) and another series of sequences where she sports an eyepatch to correct amblyopia ex anopsia.
Charlie Brown, on the other hand, seems just as crushed by the weight of the world as ever, yet now in a new way. Where before it seemed that it was his acquaintances who would casually cut him down at the knees, now he seems to be struggling against his own inadequacies. It may make him that much more of a tragic figure in the classical sense, but it's just as tough to take.
It's possible, though, that a new character is being introduced without quite making a big deal of it. In an earlier volume, there was a storyline that involved baby birds hatching in a nest on top of Snoopy's doghouse. There are two similar storylines in this volume. In the first, we see a mother bird with curls on top of her head and Snoopy has to live on top of a mailbox, and in the second the nest is built on his stomach. This makes him somewhat impatient to have the two baby birds leave, and they don't quite learn to fly well before that happens... and then, one of them returns tracing the same erratic line, a bit lighter in build than all the other birds and beginning to bear a first resemblance to Woodstock. I did wonder for a moment what had happened to the other bird.
Then, one Sunday in October of 1965, Snoopy strides out into the first panel in flying helmet, goggles, and scarf. I had been looking forward to recognising the first World War I Flying Ace strip for what it was, but in the process I was also surprised by a resemblance to two Sunday pages from 1961, where Snoopy was standing on top of his doghouse pretending to be a captain in a storm at sea or hunting pirates. As with them, Linus showed up from behind, understood just what he was playing at, and got into the game, managing to surprise Snoopy and make him bail out in panic... this time around, perhaps, the props may have helped make the difference. (Other props get added as Snoopy becomes a French Foreign Legionnaire and "borrows" Sally's eyepatch for his pirate costume.) Snoopy flies his Sopwith Camel again in the next month (and parachutes out of it, something not many World War I flying aces were able to do), and then in 1966, encounters with the Red Baron follow one after another on Sundays and during the week. After having read more than a year's worth of comics between the first and second appearances of Lucy's psychiatric help booth, it was kind of nice to things move more quickly. On the other hand, there's a week's worth of strips where Snoopy is not just writing stories on his portable typewriter but selling them, every one of them beginning with "It was a dark and stormy night." The sequence wound up, decades later, in "Unseen Peanuts," and it appears it'll be a while yet before Snoopy's writing career becomes a way for Schulz to build strips around "groaner" puns. (He'd done some of that before, with comic strips Charlie Brown himself described but didn't show to the audience.) As for the World War I Flying Ace, I had become aware of late that Snoopy sometimes referred to himself as a mere "World War I Pilot," at times alternating between the names over the course of a week... but he did start as a Flying Ace, instead of "promoting" himself along the way.
During the summer of 1965, Charlie Brown is packed off against his will to summer camp for the first time, and accomplishes the significant feat of becoming friends with another lonely kid, Roy. Roy meets Linus at camp the next summer, and then he reads a letter from Linus to another one of his friends, "Peppermint" Patty... and with someone from outside the neighbourhood wandering in, there's a new perspective on things. A lot of the strips during her first appearance amount to jokes about her using names like "Chuck" and "Lucille," but in her second, by which time the quotation marks are gone from her name, she begins to show some of the vulnerability that helps define her character in my mind as she embraces the idea of the Great Pumpkin and makes her own approximation of a pumpkin patch.
After all of that, there was one other change right near the close of the book that I had been wondering about. The title panel of the Sunday strips change from a simple "Peanuts," usually in a box by this point, to "Peanuts featuring 'Good ol' Charlie Brown'," Schulz's effort to downplay a title he always liked complaining about. In one of those Sunday pages, Linus reads the Christmas story from the gospel of Luke, managing to obliquely reference "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Some comments I've seen wondered why Linus made a point of saying he was "reading from the Revised Standard Version," but to me it's obvious that it's just a bit of dialogue to fill the doubly disposable panel on the top right of the Sunday page.
The volume started off with the resolution of a "cliffhanger" where Charlie Brown had been putting off and putting off reading "Gulliver's Travels" and writing a book report about it. Of course, I'd seen that particular storyline before in an earlier reprint book, which continued, along with another one of the first reprint books my family had, to make much of the beginning of this volume familiar. Mixed in to two familiar storylines, though, were comic strips that hadn't been collected before, adding new details to Snoopy trying to romance an (unseen) girl beagle he meets at a skating patch and Linus's security blanket developing a life of its own to creep after and throw itself on Lucy. At one point, it shapes one end into a hand to shake and make up with her, only to then toss her over Linus's head... I once read in a biography of Charles M. Schulz that he had thought of a sequence where the blanket chased everyone in the cast, only to have his syndicate reject it in a rare move. If true, of course, that might have made the blanket a little too monstrous, but the sequence as it exists is kind of fun to me and a prelude to the increasing amount of fantasy worked into the strip.
I had also read about one Sunday page before, where Charlie Brown winds up in a phone booth at the end giving its phone number, in a book written by the producer of the Peanuts television specials Lee Mendelson. It turns out that Charlie Brown gave Meldelson's number... From the date of the strip, though, I can imagine Schulz being in constant phone contact with Mendelson working out the details for "A Charlie Brown Christmas," so it's not surprising to me that the number wound up being written in by accident.
One thing I did begin wondering about as I read through 1965's strips was if Peanuts had begun to focus still further on its "Big Four" characters, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, and Linus, to the increased exclusion of everyone else. Even an old reliable like Schroeder seemed diminished. Sally did have a few storylines, including one where she struggles with the "New Math" (complaining, as she'd done before, that all she wanted to be was a housewife; I can wonder if this began to seem a little dated in thinking ahead to later strips where she's just plain lazy) and another series of sequences where she sports an eyepatch to correct amblyopia ex anopsia.
Charlie Brown, on the other hand, seems just as crushed by the weight of the world as ever, yet now in a new way. Where before it seemed that it was his acquaintances who would casually cut him down at the knees, now he seems to be struggling against his own inadequacies. It may make him that much more of a tragic figure in the classical sense, but it's just as tough to take.
It's possible, though, that a new character is being introduced without quite making a big deal of it. In an earlier volume, there was a storyline that involved baby birds hatching in a nest on top of Snoopy's doghouse. There are two similar storylines in this volume. In the first, we see a mother bird with curls on top of her head and Snoopy has to live on top of a mailbox, and in the second the nest is built on his stomach. This makes him somewhat impatient to have the two baby birds leave, and they don't quite learn to fly well before that happens... and then, one of them returns tracing the same erratic line, a bit lighter in build than all the other birds and beginning to bear a first resemblance to Woodstock. I did wonder for a moment what had happened to the other bird.
Then, one Sunday in October of 1965, Snoopy strides out into the first panel in flying helmet, goggles, and scarf. I had been looking forward to recognising the first World War I Flying Ace strip for what it was, but in the process I was also surprised by a resemblance to two Sunday pages from 1961, where Snoopy was standing on top of his doghouse pretending to be a captain in a storm at sea or hunting pirates. As with them, Linus showed up from behind, understood just what he was playing at, and got into the game, managing to surprise Snoopy and make him bail out in panic... this time around, perhaps, the props may have helped make the difference. (Other props get added as Snoopy becomes a French Foreign Legionnaire and "borrows" Sally's eyepatch for his pirate costume.) Snoopy flies his Sopwith Camel again in the next month (and parachutes out of it, something not many World War I flying aces were able to do), and then in 1966, encounters with the Red Baron follow one after another on Sundays and during the week. After having read more than a year's worth of comics between the first and second appearances of Lucy's psychiatric help booth, it was kind of nice to things move more quickly. On the other hand, there's a week's worth of strips where Snoopy is not just writing stories on his portable typewriter but selling them, every one of them beginning with "It was a dark and stormy night." The sequence wound up, decades later, in "Unseen Peanuts," and it appears it'll be a while yet before Snoopy's writing career becomes a way for Schulz to build strips around "groaner" puns. (He'd done some of that before, with comic strips Charlie Brown himself described but didn't show to the audience.) As for the World War I Flying Ace, I had become aware of late that Snoopy sometimes referred to himself as a mere "World War I Pilot," at times alternating between the names over the course of a week... but he did start as a Flying Ace, instead of "promoting" himself along the way.
During the summer of 1965, Charlie Brown is packed off against his will to summer camp for the first time, and accomplishes the significant feat of becoming friends with another lonely kid, Roy. Roy meets Linus at camp the next summer, and then he reads a letter from Linus to another one of his friends, "Peppermint" Patty... and with someone from outside the neighbourhood wandering in, there's a new perspective on things. A lot of the strips during her first appearance amount to jokes about her using names like "Chuck" and "Lucille," but in her second, by which time the quotation marks are gone from her name, she begins to show some of the vulnerability that helps define her character in my mind as she embraces the idea of the Great Pumpkin and makes her own approximation of a pumpkin patch.
After all of that, there was one other change right near the close of the book that I had been wondering about. The title panel of the Sunday strips change from a simple "Peanuts," usually in a box by this point, to "Peanuts featuring 'Good ol' Charlie Brown'," Schulz's effort to downplay a title he always liked complaining about. In one of those Sunday pages, Linus reads the Christmas story from the gospel of Luke, managing to obliquely reference "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Some comments I've seen wondered why Linus made a point of saying he was "reading from the Revised Standard Version," but to me it's obvious that it's just a bit of dialogue to fill the doubly disposable panel on the top right of the Sunday page.