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krpalmerIt's bothered me a little that since starting to post to this journal, I've written posts about TV shows and movies but not about books. I like to think of myself as a reader, but these days there always seems to be something that "needs" watching to chew up my free time and get in the way of just sitting down and cruising through a book. Now, though, I have finished a book with postable thoughts... if a book of comic strips. On the other hand, the comic strips do happen to be Peanuts.
Peanuts is one more of those things that my interest in is rooted way, way back. As a kid, I read it in the newspapers and in what collection books were at home and in the school library; unaware of the comments about how hard it was to imitate Charles M. Schulz's style, I began drawing the characters myself. (Of course, in most ways they weren't exactly faithful versions; they wound up populating bizarre crossover fusions of science-fiction sagas.) As I grew older, I started snapping up every collection book I could find in used book sales, unfortunately with the awareness that they had just about vanished from regular bookstores. It had become very easy to just take Schulz's work for granted, or even dismiss big chunks of it altogether, in the final years of the strip. In a world where Bill Watterson took the bold step of ending Calvin and Hobbes with his audience still wanting more, Schulz's still working didn't seem to matter that much. (I think there can be a quiet, wistful melancholy to those last years of Peanuts, although I also get annoyed by the curtest of the dismissals.)
I was therefore very much interested in the news that Fantagraphics Books would be republishing every single Peanuts strip in a lengthy series of volumes, and quite pleased to see it start. That series has now entered the second decade of the strip, covering 1961 and 1962. (I noted with some slight interest that the art on the endpapers and the picture of Schulz has changed to reflect the new decade.) Some of the Sunday pages from those years were reprinted in some of the first collection books I read; this has made the most recent volumes almost a homecoming for me.
As with some homecomings, though, certain moments can be affecting. By 1961, Charlie Brown was firmly in the grip of existential angst; several Sunday pages end with the dark moment of Lucy screaming out laughter at some dream he's foolishly revealed to her as he whimpers, "I can't stand it... I just can't stand it!" Sports have become even more an imitation of life for him, with fly balls thudding to the ground right next to the uncaring outfielders, but his baseball team is still more than willing to hold his own failures against him when they're not just walking away from him. One thing that I was hoping would return in this volume is Lucy's psychiatric help booth, which I was pleased to first see appear in prototype in 1959 but surprised didn't appear in the rest of the previous volume. The booth quickly takes on its familiar appearance, but Lucy's five-cent help isn't very useful.
Fortunately, the strip wasn't just about tormenting Charlie Brown. Continuing to experiment, Schulz introduces Frieda early in 1961. She talks a lot and has naturally curly hair, but her initially heavy use doesn't quite seem to give her a solid foothold among the others. A little later on, to put a quite recognisable Snoopy in his place, she asks for and gets a cat. Schulz later on declared on several intervals that Faron the cat didn't work out, in part because of the risk he would make Snoopy act like a "real dog," and in part because he decided he didn't draw cats very well. It's true that to me Faron, usually carried limply over Frieda's arms, doesn't look "quite right," although he shows a moment of character or two before he vanishes a few months in. A bit more fitting, somehow, are the birds who are beginning to cluster around Snoopy's doghouse, although at this point there are only the first faint echoes of the evolution that would turn them into Woodstock by the end of the decade. There's one more experiment in 1962, when Linus starts wearing glasses. Those strips caught my attention when I saw some of them years ago, but he stops wearing them by the end of the year. Perhaps they made him stand out a little too much, and perhaps they just showed up the pecularities of the Peanuts character designs in a way that Marcie's glasses don't. (I did, though, recently get a reprint copy of the famous Peanuts mini-book "Happiness is a Warm Puppy," also from 1962, and Linus has his glasses on in a lot of the pictures in it.)
There are some interesting cultural-reference moments too along the way, although perhaps they're interesting because they're a challenge to "get" nowadays. Lucy pointedly directs Linus to look at pictures of "the little girl playing on the White House lawn," who isn't holding a blanket; Linus decides to write away and offer her one because perhaps her parents can't afford to get her one, but he doesn't know her name. The next year, after Lucy has turned Linus's blanket into a kite that blew away over the Pacific to be rescued, Linus makes a comment including "Lieutenant Commander Carpenter."
As another review said, by this point you're either sold on The Complete Peanuts or you aren't, but I'm once more thinking another volume ahead.
Peanuts is one more of those things that my interest in is rooted way, way back. As a kid, I read it in the newspapers and in what collection books were at home and in the school library; unaware of the comments about how hard it was to imitate Charles M. Schulz's style, I began drawing the characters myself. (Of course, in most ways they weren't exactly faithful versions; they wound up populating bizarre crossover fusions of science-fiction sagas.) As I grew older, I started snapping up every collection book I could find in used book sales, unfortunately with the awareness that they had just about vanished from regular bookstores. It had become very easy to just take Schulz's work for granted, or even dismiss big chunks of it altogether, in the final years of the strip. In a world where Bill Watterson took the bold step of ending Calvin and Hobbes with his audience still wanting more, Schulz's still working didn't seem to matter that much. (I think there can be a quiet, wistful melancholy to those last years of Peanuts, although I also get annoyed by the curtest of the dismissals.)
I was therefore very much interested in the news that Fantagraphics Books would be republishing every single Peanuts strip in a lengthy series of volumes, and quite pleased to see it start. That series has now entered the second decade of the strip, covering 1961 and 1962. (I noted with some slight interest that the art on the endpapers and the picture of Schulz has changed to reflect the new decade.) Some of the Sunday pages from those years were reprinted in some of the first collection books I read; this has made the most recent volumes almost a homecoming for me.
As with some homecomings, though, certain moments can be affecting. By 1961, Charlie Brown was firmly in the grip of existential angst; several Sunday pages end with the dark moment of Lucy screaming out laughter at some dream he's foolishly revealed to her as he whimpers, "I can't stand it... I just can't stand it!" Sports have become even more an imitation of life for him, with fly balls thudding to the ground right next to the uncaring outfielders, but his baseball team is still more than willing to hold his own failures against him when they're not just walking away from him. One thing that I was hoping would return in this volume is Lucy's psychiatric help booth, which I was pleased to first see appear in prototype in 1959 but surprised didn't appear in the rest of the previous volume. The booth quickly takes on its familiar appearance, but Lucy's five-cent help isn't very useful.
Fortunately, the strip wasn't just about tormenting Charlie Brown. Continuing to experiment, Schulz introduces Frieda early in 1961. She talks a lot and has naturally curly hair, but her initially heavy use doesn't quite seem to give her a solid foothold among the others. A little later on, to put a quite recognisable Snoopy in his place, she asks for and gets a cat. Schulz later on declared on several intervals that Faron the cat didn't work out, in part because of the risk he would make Snoopy act like a "real dog," and in part because he decided he didn't draw cats very well. It's true that to me Faron, usually carried limply over Frieda's arms, doesn't look "quite right," although he shows a moment of character or two before he vanishes a few months in. A bit more fitting, somehow, are the birds who are beginning to cluster around Snoopy's doghouse, although at this point there are only the first faint echoes of the evolution that would turn them into Woodstock by the end of the decade. There's one more experiment in 1962, when Linus starts wearing glasses. Those strips caught my attention when I saw some of them years ago, but he stops wearing them by the end of the year. Perhaps they made him stand out a little too much, and perhaps they just showed up the pecularities of the Peanuts character designs in a way that Marcie's glasses don't. (I did, though, recently get a reprint copy of the famous Peanuts mini-book "Happiness is a Warm Puppy," also from 1962, and Linus has his glasses on in a lot of the pictures in it.)
There are some interesting cultural-reference moments too along the way, although perhaps they're interesting because they're a challenge to "get" nowadays. Lucy pointedly directs Linus to look at pictures of "the little girl playing on the White House lawn," who isn't holding a blanket; Linus decides to write away and offer her one because perhaps her parents can't afford to get her one, but he doesn't know her name. The next year, after Lucy has turned Linus's blanket into a kite that blew away over the Pacific to be rescued, Linus makes a comment including "Lieutenant Commander Carpenter."
As another review said, by this point you're either sold on The Complete Peanuts or you aren't, but I'm once more thinking another volume ahead.