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krpalmerIt’s possible I was a little slow to order a copy of the latest Peanuts Every Sunday colour reprint book, and while I always take my time reading through them my pace did slacken a little every so often with this volume. Getting into the 1980s, while it means reaching Sunday pages I might actually have read as they were being published (although my family’s newspaper colour comic section was in the Saturday edition, where Peanuts was the sole comic always run with the disposable “top tier” panels included), also seems to move undeniably into the “institution years” many commentators (and not always “online”) make a show of dismissing. I did ponder the back cover blurb mentioning Marbles, one of Snoopy’s brothers. Around the middle of the 1980s I glanced through a nearly-new reprint volume in a bookstore and hit on the strips he appeared in, and his spotty design stuck in my mind (although not all of the spots registered at the time), but this might have been a lucky happenstance: Marbles didn’t appear for long, and only in the weekday strips.
“This doesn’t taste like mint..”
Starting off, though, the very first Sunday page in the volume, with Peppermint Patty “drowning in a sea of unanswered questions,” was one that’s stuck in my memory in a good way. I reflected a bit on the reprint books that had been in my school library, but before long was getting to pages I couldn’t seem to remember from them, or even from two and a half volumes of “The Complete Peanuts” published just a few years ago. “Rediscovery,” though, was something I was fine with.
“All we had was vanilla...”
A part of reading these books is just to see the colour, and I did get to thinking it was surprising to see Lucy in a red shirt (my mental picture had been of a white shirt, although I also admitted that with the last volume), her elaborate dress left over from the 1950s hardly appearing. That meant Linus always seemed to be in a blue shirt, which clashes not just with “mental pictures” but the animation. More than that, there were a few pages where colour got tied into the gags rather than just decorating a longer setup than on weekdays.
“but you can do amazing things with a green felt tip pen”
Snoopy’s more famous brother Spike did show up in several Sunday pages as his lonely life in the desert outside Needles developed, but another thing I did notice near the close of this volume was the characters starting to look a bit squatter. There should be three more volumes in this series, after which I’ll just have to get used to going back to things I already have.
“This doesn’t taste like mint..”
Starting off, though, the very first Sunday page in the volume, with Peppermint Patty “drowning in a sea of unanswered questions,” was one that’s stuck in my memory in a good way. I reflected a bit on the reprint books that had been in my school library, but before long was getting to pages I couldn’t seem to remember from them, or even from two and a half volumes of “The Complete Peanuts” published just a few years ago. “Rediscovery,” though, was something I was fine with.
“All we had was vanilla...”
A part of reading these books is just to see the colour, and I did get to thinking it was surprising to see Lucy in a red shirt (my mental picture had been of a white shirt, although I also admitted that with the last volume), her elaborate dress left over from the 1950s hardly appearing. That meant Linus always seemed to be in a blue shirt, which clashes not just with “mental pictures” but the animation. More than that, there were a few pages where colour got tied into the gags rather than just decorating a longer setup than on weekdays.
“but you can do amazing things with a green felt tip pen”
Snoopy’s more famous brother Spike did show up in several Sunday pages as his lonely life in the desert outside Needles developed, but another thing I did notice near the close of this volume was the characters starting to look a bit squatter. There should be three more volumes in this series, after which I’ll just have to get used to going back to things I already have.