From the Bookshelf: The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984

I suppose each volume of "The Complete Peanuts" coming out may now reach me with slight feelings of melancholic uncertainty about whether this time I won't have anything to say about it in the end. With that admitted again, though, on starting with the introduction by Leonard Maltin I was struck by a comment of his about how, while it may have been easy to pass over the strips of the first part of the 1980s then, they still reward attention with their sense of familiarity. That was worth mulling over for me, even if as I started into the volume I had the feeling of being able to remember quite a few of the strips from a reprint volume I got fairly early on (not even as a used book, which was how I saw a good part of the strip). I also had the added impression a good number of jokes had also made it into animation on "The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show," which was being made around that time. (So far as animation goes, Leonard Maltin does manage to bring in one of his interests by referring to the UPA cartoons of the 1950s as having a tangential connection to Charles M. Schulz's deliberate minimalism.)
( 'What did the teacher write on yours, sir?' )

( 'Grody to the max!' )