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From the (Library e-)Comics Rack: Here's to You, Charlie Brown
It got my attention when Titan Comics started printing facsimile editions of the original Holt, Rinehart and Winston Peanuts collections. When, after a hiatus, they printed a few more facsimiles that got my attention again. The Hoopla application managed to inform me of yet another revived collection, one that took an odd jump forward in the chronology. Now, another collection has shown up there, and it’s another odd surprise.
I’m familiar enough now with the original Peanuts collections for the name Here’s to You, Charlie Brown to stand out. After a little while I thought of the Fawcett Crest paperbacks that had got halves of the Holt, Rinehart and Winston collections into the more mass-market book racks of their day. Those smaller books were much more in evidence in used book stores and book sales in the 1990s, which was when I started making stronger efforts to track down the past years of Peanuts.
The page count of the ebook in Hoopla was the same as the previous collections there, though, which left me a little curious again. I went ahead and signed the collection out. As soon as I was looking at it, however, it was obvious it was indeed the Fawcett Crest book, with the panels arranged vertically and sometimes cutting the corners of others off to fit one strip to a page. That, of course, explained how it could be “half a collection” of a book that had put two strips on a page. I could at least consider how the reproduction of the artwork looked much better than the way it had on the cheap paper of the paperback, but I was also inclined to consider how the first Complete Peanuts collections from Fantagraphics are available through Hoopla, which gets to and beyond the strips in Here’s to You, Charlie Brown and doesn’t cut off their corners. (Anyway, even with the additional odd touch of the collection being “part two” of You Can’t Win, Charlie Brown, it features the “Linus in glasses” strips.)
I’m familiar enough now with the original Peanuts collections for the name Here’s to You, Charlie Brown to stand out. After a little while I thought of the Fawcett Crest paperbacks that had got halves of the Holt, Rinehart and Winston collections into the more mass-market book racks of their day. Those smaller books were much more in evidence in used book stores and book sales in the 1990s, which was when I started making stronger efforts to track down the past years of Peanuts.
The page count of the ebook in Hoopla was the same as the previous collections there, though, which left me a little curious again. I went ahead and signed the collection out. As soon as I was looking at it, however, it was obvious it was indeed the Fawcett Crest book, with the panels arranged vertically and sometimes cutting the corners of others off to fit one strip to a page. That, of course, explained how it could be “half a collection” of a book that had put two strips on a page. I could at least consider how the reproduction of the artwork looked much better than the way it had on the cheap paper of the paperback, but I was also inclined to consider how the first Complete Peanuts collections from Fantagraphics are available through Hoopla, which gets to and beyond the strips in Here’s to You, Charlie Brown and doesn’t cut off their corners. (Anyway, even with the additional odd touch of the collection being “part two” of You Can’t Win, Charlie Brown, it features the “Linus in glasses” strips.)