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From the Bookshelf: The Complete Peanuts 1993-1994
It was getting to me as I started into the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts that there wouldn't be many more to go, but this reminded me yet again of the possibility I might read this one and not be able to, or not want to, say anything about it. The introduction seemed positive enough again, however, and I started into things ready to let them accumulate a bit at a time.
The baseball strips started early in the year, and an awareness there was a surprise this time did hit me even as I was supposing how easy it would have been to see them as the familiar buildup to the big letdown (even as Lucy fishes a cell phone out of her pocket while standing in the outfield). Then, Charlie Brown dances home exclaiming how he "hit a home run in the ninth inning, and we won! I was the hero!" (Sally's response: "You?!") He does, however, encounter the pitcher he hit the run off of, "the great-granddaughter of Roy Hobbs," and after a further matchup things get back to normal at last, even as Charlie Brown moans that "Roy Hobbs was a fictional character," which "Royanne" doesn't take well either.
After the controversy around the big biography of Charles M. Schulz, I do want to be a little cautious about supposing every detail in Peanuts to be drawn from Schulz's own life, given the apparent temptation to conclude "the strip was only interesting when he was unloading his trauma." However, when Snoopy is in the hospital and a shaggy sibling of his shows up (along with the returning "ugly dog" Olaf) to be named "Andy," I did remembering Schulz had a shaggy dog of that name around that time he became fond of, and whose death affected him. There were some strips in this volume where Snoopy seemed to be "more like a dog" (including a Father's Day Sunday page where he was playing fetch with Charlie Brown's off-panel dad), and I did sort of realise as I read my way through that there seemed less of an emphasis on "cookies" than I'd been perhaps a little concerned about with the previous volume.
As I got later into 1994 (which included Snoopy coming ashore at Omaha Beach as "the World Famous G.I.") and a sequence where, after long years of the references that called Charlie Brown's nameless pen pal a "he," he's writing to a girl in Scotland named Morag (later on, Snoopy manages to reference the Loch Ness Monster), I realized I'd been clipping those comics out of the newspaper and sticking them in a notebook, having been inspired by a brief suggestion in Rheta Grimsley Johnson's old biography "Good Grief" that it was a little harder to dismiss the strip even in its later years when it wasn't being read one isolated day at a time. The experiment had seemed to work a bit for me back then, and now I could tell Linus and Lucy's little brother Rerun was starting to become a bit more prominent, something that does let me look forward to the remaining volumes.
The baseball strips started early in the year, and an awareness there was a surprise this time did hit me even as I was supposing how easy it would have been to see them as the familiar buildup to the big letdown (even as Lucy fishes a cell phone out of her pocket while standing in the outfield). Then, Charlie Brown dances home exclaiming how he "hit a home run in the ninth inning, and we won! I was the hero!" (Sally's response: "You?!") He does, however, encounter the pitcher he hit the run off of, "the great-granddaughter of Roy Hobbs," and after a further matchup things get back to normal at last, even as Charlie Brown moans that "Roy Hobbs was a fictional character," which "Royanne" doesn't take well either.
After the controversy around the big biography of Charles M. Schulz, I do want to be a little cautious about supposing every detail in Peanuts to be drawn from Schulz's own life, given the apparent temptation to conclude "the strip was only interesting when he was unloading his trauma." However, when Snoopy is in the hospital and a shaggy sibling of his shows up (along with the returning "ugly dog" Olaf) to be named "Andy," I did remembering Schulz had a shaggy dog of that name around that time he became fond of, and whose death affected him. There were some strips in this volume where Snoopy seemed to be "more like a dog" (including a Father's Day Sunday page where he was playing fetch with Charlie Brown's off-panel dad), and I did sort of realise as I read my way through that there seemed less of an emphasis on "cookies" than I'd been perhaps a little concerned about with the previous volume.
As I got later into 1994 (which included Snoopy coming ashore at Omaha Beach as "the World Famous G.I.") and a sequence where, after long years of the references that called Charlie Brown's nameless pen pal a "he," he's writing to a girl in Scotland named Morag (later on, Snoopy manages to reference the Loch Ness Monster), I realized I'd been clipping those comics out of the newspaper and sticking them in a notebook, having been inspired by a brief suggestion in Rheta Grimsley Johnson's old biography "Good Grief" that it was a little harder to dismiss the strip even in its later years when it wasn't being read one isolated day at a time. The experiment had seemed to work a bit for me back then, and now I could tell Linus and Lucy's little brother Rerun was starting to become a bit more prominent, something that does let me look forward to the remaining volumes.