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krpalmerI got the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts by mail order, which seems to have delivered it sooner in the year than waiting for it to show up in the bookstore usually seems to take. Even as I was opening the box, the bright yellow of the cover caught my attention as compared to the more sombre shades of the previous volumes. I was also interested in how the pages at the front and back of the book would change with the series now into the 1970s. However, I may have been expecting the comic strips themselves to be familiar enough: while, unlike with the previous volume, a good chunk of them wouldn't have been included in one of the first Peanuts books I ever saw, they had been rerun on the official site several years ago... and yet, somehow the experience seemed fresh and surprising to me.
Two things that I perhaps associate with Peanuts in the 1970s, Snoopy playing tennis and other sports and writing corny jokes on his typewriter, were at best developing in this volume. Perhaps instead of writing, Snoopy spends some time reading "The Six Bunny-Wunnies" series by Miss Helen Sweetstory. He sends her a manuscript of "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night," confident that "Famous authors like to receive manuscripts from unknown writers... They like to be helpful, and because they don't have regular jobs, they have lots of time to write to people." Unfortunately, after learning that she has twenty-four pet cats, he gives his books to Linus, but eventually seems to get over it and plans to write her biography.
One thing that kind of interested me about this volume was several strips where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty just sit under a tree and talk: after all those years stuck with neighbourhood girls who won't give him the time of day, it seems time enough for something like that to happen. As for Peppermint Patty herself, Marcie gets introduced in this volume but only appears three times, always as "the girl from summer camp." I suppose that's one more thing to be interested in seeing change.
Two things that I perhaps associate with Peanuts in the 1970s, Snoopy playing tennis and other sports and writing corny jokes on his typewriter, were at best developing in this volume. Perhaps instead of writing, Snoopy spends some time reading "The Six Bunny-Wunnies" series by Miss Helen Sweetstory. He sends her a manuscript of "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night," confident that "Famous authors like to receive manuscripts from unknown writers... They like to be helpful, and because they don't have regular jobs, they have lots of time to write to people." Unfortunately, after learning that she has twenty-four pet cats, he gives his books to Linus, but eventually seems to get over it and plans to write her biography.
One thing that kind of interested me about this volume was several strips where Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty just sit under a tree and talk: after all those years stuck with neighbourhood girls who won't give him the time of day, it seems time enough for something like that to happen. As for Peppermint Patty herself, Marcie gets introduced in this volume but only appears three times, always as "the girl from summer camp." I suppose that's one more thing to be interested in seeing change.