From the Bookshelf: The Essential Peanuts
May. 31st, 2026 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOn noticing a “book-in-a-box” marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of Peanuts I at least got to wondering about it. I managed to find a look at on the “AAUGH Blog,” and after that I wound up asking for “The Essential Peanuts” as a birthday present.
The central idea of the book is singling out seventy-five strips and Sunday pages, with additional selections expanding on many of those “Essentials.” I suppose this book makes me a little conscious of how, after accumulating the “Complete Peanuts” books, I went to the point of buying reprints and used copies of the original collections of the first two decades of the strips, collections which were to some extent selective; this book does of course seem that much more so. When it comes to certain ideas a few specific “Essentials” are meant to introduce and sum up I am tempted to say I’d make different selections. Of course, it’s possible to think happening on personal ideas “part of the fun” too.
This book has Mark Evanier’s name on the cover. I’m aware of him being a “comics commentator,” and was also aware going into the book of how he makes a certain point of having interacted with Charles M. Schulz the one time the cartoonist appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con (if in 1974, before it was quite the commercial juggernaut is now). Every so often the narrative text becomes personal in a casual way. There are other contributions from other people throughout the book, with cartoonist Patrick McDonnell providing the introduction and mentioning he’d worked on a fiftieth anniversary book published the year before (I have a copy of it) and people who’ve worked on recent animated specials near the back. One intriguing spread offered “all 100 covers of the Fawcett Crest Peanuts paperbacks,” although once I’d looked at them I saw one “later edition” and one “British edition” breaking up the graphical evolution. The book pays more attention to the final decade and days of the strip than the most dismissive takes I’m sometimes a little too conscious of. To close things out, though, I did turn to the folder of “supplemental material” also tucked into the box. While I haven’t yet opened the postcards or cards, I did flip through a “replica comic book,” becoming conscious most of the stories in it felt familiar; I suppose the point of it being selected was that Schulz himself had worked on most of those stories, and they’d appeared in the concluding volume of The Complete Peanuts for that reason.
The central idea of the book is singling out seventy-five strips and Sunday pages, with additional selections expanding on many of those “Essentials.” I suppose this book makes me a little conscious of how, after accumulating the “Complete Peanuts” books, I went to the point of buying reprints and used copies of the original collections of the first two decades of the strips, collections which were to some extent selective; this book does of course seem that much more so. When it comes to certain ideas a few specific “Essentials” are meant to introduce and sum up I am tempted to say I’d make different selections. Of course, it’s possible to think happening on personal ideas “part of the fun” too.
This book has Mark Evanier’s name on the cover. I’m aware of him being a “comics commentator,” and was also aware going into the book of how he makes a certain point of having interacted with Charles M. Schulz the one time the cartoonist appeared at the San Diego Comic-Con (if in 1974, before it was quite the commercial juggernaut is now). Every so often the narrative text becomes personal in a casual way. There are other contributions from other people throughout the book, with cartoonist Patrick McDonnell providing the introduction and mentioning he’d worked on a fiftieth anniversary book published the year before (I have a copy of it) and people who’ve worked on recent animated specials near the back. One intriguing spread offered “all 100 covers of the Fawcett Crest Peanuts paperbacks,” although once I’d looked at them I saw one “later edition” and one “British edition” breaking up the graphical evolution. The book pays more attention to the final decade and days of the strip than the most dismissive takes I’m sometimes a little too conscious of. To close things out, though, I did turn to the folder of “supplemental material” also tucked into the box. While I haven’t yet opened the postcards or cards, I did flip through a “replica comic book,” becoming conscious most of the stories in it felt familiar; I suppose the point of it being selected was that Schulz himself had worked on most of those stories, and they’d appeared in the concluding volume of The Complete Peanuts for that reason.
no subject
Date: 2026-06-06 11:10 pm (UTC)(These were how I got introduced to collected editions of Peanuts as a four or five-year-old.)
no subject
Date: 2026-06-07 08:11 pm (UTC)