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Early Days Over Again
With this year being the sixty-fifth anniversary of Peanuts and a major motion picture set to premiere, a variety of books are showing up too. The volumes of The Complete Peanuts I have lined up on a bookshelf perhaps put me in a mood where I've supposed I don't need anything else, but the announcement some of the very first comic strip collections were to be reprinted got my attention anyway. I'd already known plenty of strips hadn't been reprinted in those books; for some reason, wondering what had been had me contemplating the past experiences of the first people who hadn't made scrapbooks but still sought something more permanent than one strip a day in their newspapers. I started looking up the ISBNs for the reprint books so I could order them should I decide to; then, I found the first two of them on a shelf at the local bookstore and accepted the opportunity and the decision somehow made for me by buying both. They weren't that expensive anyway.
The first Peanuts collection, called just "Peanuts," wasn't split into the little Fawcett Crest paperbacks I eventually got into the habit of searching used book stores and sales for before The Complete Peanuts began; nor was it reprinted in the bigger "Peanuts Parade" paperbacks of the 1970s. That did sort of let the earliest years of the comic strip drift into obscurity until Chip Kidd's "Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz" devoted a great deal of space to jumbled reproductions of old scrapbook clippings, which started people commenting about how different those first years were. The reprint leads off with a foreword comparing the comic strip to Krazy Kat: at that point, it seemed more anticipatory than anything. I did sort of fix on how the strips in the book were jumbled up: the appearance of the Peanuts characters changed enough just in 1951, from great big heads on little bodies to more human proportions still with big eyes for being dots of ink (that qualifies in my eyes as the "cute period"), that the interlopers stand out. However, we do get the introductory strips for Violet and Schroeder, who was the first character to appear as a baby; when he started playing the piano, the jokes tended towards "infant prodigy."
The second collection, "More Peanuts," was reprinted; I remember seeing a Peanuts Parade book with its strips in the library when I was young and being sort of surprised by them. It happened to leave out the first strips featuring Lucy, though, when she had circles all the way around the dots of her eyes (the index of The Complete Peanuts mentions "googly eyes") and spoke in a baby-talk third person. After its remaining strips from the "cute period," things became still more recognisable; however, I think I'll at least be watching for the remaining early books to be reprinted, even if everything scheduled will only get to the end of the 1950s.
The first Peanuts collection, called just "Peanuts," wasn't split into the little Fawcett Crest paperbacks I eventually got into the habit of searching used book stores and sales for before The Complete Peanuts began; nor was it reprinted in the bigger "Peanuts Parade" paperbacks of the 1970s. That did sort of let the earliest years of the comic strip drift into obscurity until Chip Kidd's "Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz" devoted a great deal of space to jumbled reproductions of old scrapbook clippings, which started people commenting about how different those first years were. The reprint leads off with a foreword comparing the comic strip to Krazy Kat: at that point, it seemed more anticipatory than anything. I did sort of fix on how the strips in the book were jumbled up: the appearance of the Peanuts characters changed enough just in 1951, from great big heads on little bodies to more human proportions still with big eyes for being dots of ink (that qualifies in my eyes as the "cute period"), that the interlopers stand out. However, we do get the introductory strips for Violet and Schroeder, who was the first character to appear as a baby; when he started playing the piano, the jokes tended towards "infant prodigy."
The second collection, "More Peanuts," was reprinted; I remember seeing a Peanuts Parade book with its strips in the library when I was young and being sort of surprised by them. It happened to leave out the first strips featuring Lucy, though, when she had circles all the way around the dots of her eyes (the index of The Complete Peanuts mentions "googly eyes") and spoke in a baby-talk third person. After its remaining strips from the "cute period," things became still more recognisable; however, I think I'll at least be watching for the remaining early books to be reprinted, even if everything scheduled will only get to the end of the 1950s.