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krpalmerAfter buying four of the big volumes reprinting the Peanuts Sunday pages in colour, following up with the fifth in the series was easy enough to consider. I did, though, mention it on my Christmas list only to wind up buying it myself. It brought me to the halfway point, even if I had to face familiar ambiguities brushed by here and there about opinions pushed on what was yet to come, or what some seem to imply began in this volume itself. An awareness Charles M. Schulz got divorced and remarried in the first half of the 1970s and seemed to do better in his second marriage can get mixed up with excessively autobiographical readings of his comic strip and an impression of certain demands on it, although that then brings to mind a comment from Charlie Brown, back when he still had a bit of the smartalec attitude he'd started with, that the one thing that cheered him up was seeing someone else depressed.
In any case, I could keep contemplating the details these books don't go into about how the information about what colours had first been used might have been preserved, and at what point the record became continuous; it's certainly been years since the mid-1950s strips among a great many not reprinted the first time around I knew had to be retouched from microfilmed newspapers. I suppose it was when the outfits of the characters didn't match how they were always painted in animation that caught my attention, but in this volume what caught my attention was how, after several early pages where Lucy wore a red dress, she wound up in a blue a bit darker than the TV specials but familiar enough. Everyone else seemed to settle into TV-inspired colour schemes around the same time. (So far as "familiarity" goes, though, at Christmas my brother showed my whole family "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and there Snoopy's doghouse was light blue...)
I did take notice of the pages where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty were sitting under a tree talking, something Charlie Brown couldn't have managed with any other girl in the comic by that point; he couldn't always say the right thing, of course. (Eventually, I noticed I'd taken note of that the first time around.) That did have me contemplating Marcie's eventual arrival in this volume. In one page, she and Peppermint Patty are flying (on top of Snoopy's doghouse) in the "Powder Puff Derby," which I knew had been surrounded by daily strips. A bit later on, though, three pages in a row had Snoopy taking four "Beagle Scouts" on a hike. I did have an impression they didn't get their names until still later on. Snoopy typing out corny stories and putting on "Pawpet Theater" shows added more amusement every so often. I was conscious as the volume came to an end that the lettering and the drawings seemed a bit bigger in their panels than they'd been, five years of the strip showing more change than two years in the volumes of "The Complete Peanuts," but all in all following up five volumes of this series with the sixth next winter is still easy enough to consider.
In any case, I could keep contemplating the details these books don't go into about how the information about what colours had first been used might have been preserved, and at what point the record became continuous; it's certainly been years since the mid-1950s strips among a great many not reprinted the first time around I knew had to be retouched from microfilmed newspapers. I suppose it was when the outfits of the characters didn't match how they were always painted in animation that caught my attention, but in this volume what caught my attention was how, after several early pages where Lucy wore a red dress, she wound up in a blue a bit darker than the TV specials but familiar enough. Everyone else seemed to settle into TV-inspired colour schemes around the same time. (So far as "familiarity" goes, though, at Christmas my brother showed my whole family "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and there Snoopy's doghouse was light blue...)
I did take notice of the pages where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty were sitting under a tree talking, something Charlie Brown couldn't have managed with any other girl in the comic by that point; he couldn't always say the right thing, of course. (Eventually, I noticed I'd taken note of that the first time around.) That did have me contemplating Marcie's eventual arrival in this volume. In one page, she and Peppermint Patty are flying (on top of Snoopy's doghouse) in the "Powder Puff Derby," which I knew had been surrounded by daily strips. A bit later on, though, three pages in a row had Snoopy taking four "Beagle Scouts" on a hike. I did have an impression they didn't get their names until still later on. Snoopy typing out corny stories and putting on "Pawpet Theater" shows added more amusement every so often. I was conscious as the volume came to an end that the lettering and the drawings seemed a bit bigger in their panels than they'd been, five years of the strip showing more change than two years in the volumes of "The Complete Peanuts," but all in all following up five volumes of this series with the sixth next winter is still easy enough to consider.