Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

When I happened to learn that someone who keeps up a news site about Peanuts books was working on one of them himself, and that the book would contain reproductions of various memorabilia, it caught my attention. I was reminded of "The Star Wars Vault" and a volume about Charles Darwin I bought from a discount shelf not that long ago (Darwin's handwriting is rather hard to read, though), and decided to order a copy of "The Peanuts Collection."

The book isn't that intimidating in size, and feels just a bit more solid in the hands than "The Star Wars Vault" did, although it doesn't have a "removable item" on every page. Those "removable items" aren't the only draw of the book, of course; something that really caught my attention was some unfinished comic strips from various eras (even if they were selected from a larger supply of them, they seem like they could have worked as finished products to me). With that said, the "removable items" (each carefully marked as a reproduction) are also interesting, ranging from a replica of an old sketch of Charlie Brown (the crumbled edge of the paper copied as well) to a letter promising the phase-out of "Good Ol' Charlotte Braun" (who had curly hair a little like Frieda's would turn out and talked real loud) to a "Project Apollo Recovery Team" sticker, which seems a particular prize of the book to me but one I sort of wish I had extra copies of so I could stick them somewhere. (I've seen original stickers on the "Mobile Quarantine Facility" in the Smithsonian, although they were covered up in the famous pictures of Richard Nixon speaking to the Apollo 11 astronauts shut up inside it.)

In alternating between pages on the characters and not just various other themes of the comic strip but also "the world beyond," though, I may have found myself contemplating a comment that Schulz started off not really interested in merchandising but unbent bit by bit, wondering about a certain attitude in a "post-Watterson era" that the proclaimed worth of Peanuts is in proportion to how much each strip can be seen as a desperate attempt by Charles M. Schulz at self-therapy. At the same time, though, the book contained a few comments from Schulz himself on the whole issue ("A lot of people apparently don't believe in insurance" and "Tapioca Pudding," who showed up in the strip in the mid-1980s, talking about how her father was going to put her on lunch boxes), which did seem to help me keep things in perspective.

It seemed to take a while through however many stages of being published and shipped, but I now have the latest volume of The Complete Peanuts. (As I was reading through it, I also happened on a link to an interesting weblog posting and commenting on Peanuts comic strips, if from decades earlier...) Frieda is on the cover, and just in time perhaps; I had read in the Peanuts FAQ that her last appearance in the comic strip was in the years this volume would cover. In fact, in reading through the book I did see her make some appearances a little later than the FAQ's last definite date, but it was just sticking her head out the front door among other strips for the week that had Charlie Brown going door to door. Charlie Brown himself is on the spine of the book, and that made me think of how this volume is right in the middle of the strip's run, and then wonder if in the volumes to follow the characters on the spine will be walking the opposite direction from the ones before, so that everybody is headed away from him.
( 'For 'show and tell' today I have brought my pet rock..' )
( 'Look at that... my 'mood ring' just exploded!' )
( 'One of the neighbors just called... you'd better turn down your CB radio!' )

I was looking at the Peanuts comics site late yesterday to see the Sunday comic, when all of a sudden I was more or less doing a double take: although familiar with one of the first "your brother pats birds on the head" comics, in this colour version of it the bird was blue, beak included. Now, there would still be years of design evolution ahead before Woodstock, who we all know to be yellow, got named, but it was still somehow strange, almost unnatural... I first managed to remember how I'd taken notice of a reference to a "blue jay" in the 1963-1964 complete collection, but then, in the midst of wondering if Charles M. Schulz's colouring guides from the early 1960s still existed, I happened to also remember that I've seen a Peanuts storybook cover also with a blue bird on it. Probably that reduces the whole thing to a curiosity.

I managed to find the tenth volume of "The Complete Peanuts," with the World War I Flying Ace on the cover, not that long ago. (He may have shown up there just in time; the number of comic strips with him in it cuts back in this volume, and by its end his appearances seem more a matter of Snoopy showing up in costume to interact with others rather than piloting his Sopwith Camel against the Red Baron. It was mentioned in the Charles M. Schulz biography "Good Grief!" that the idea began to seem less appealing to Schulz as the Vietnam War wore on...)

Perhaps this latest volume was one I'd been anticipating in a special way. It covers the last period of time I'd seen early on in the first collections my family owned, and for that matter too the comic strips from 1969 and 1970 had been shown on the official online page just a few years ago (1970 before 1969, after which the reprints jumped back a whole decade... now, though, the online page has just been revamped so that you can delve into the strip's full history, but in the process the comics that show up as you first visit the site are now from the 1990s and 1980s). For all of that apparent familiarity, though, the book still seemed to keep surprising me as I read through it a month at a time.
( 'I did it! I'm the first beagle on the moon!' )

Almost before I'd hoped to see it, I found a copy of the latest volume of "The Complete Peanuts," with Violet on a violet cover (and probably just in time for her, before she really turns into an "obscure character"), in a bookstore and bought it. As usual, I tried to "savour" the experience by reading only two months' worth of comic strips from it a day, but at times I didn't even get around to that. For all I know, that serves as a subtle reproach. Even before getting the book, though, I had heard that it's not quite "Complete" in that the May 1, 1967 comic strip ("Someday I'm going to break all the legs on his piano!") is accidentally repeated where the May 3, 1967 comic strip should be... and given some recent experiences, I can wonder if noting this will prompt a comment from a helpful Fantagraphics employee who will somehow find this post and inform me that the missing strip is going to be included as an "errata" page or something in the next volume.
( 'Now, I've seen everything... a bird hippie!' )

I got a chance to watch a repeat showing of the PBS "American Masters" program on Charles M. Schulz... with a certain added awareness that the documentary had been influenced by the new biography by David Michaelis, which I've continued noticing a good deal of discussion and dissension about. Michaelis appeared in the program, and so did Schulz's son Monte, with a computer visible in the background. That reminded me of how Monte Schulz is busy commenting and giving interviews to maintain that his father was indeed a good parent. Something about the casual responses to that about how "children always idealise their parents" is starting to bother me...

It's true that I've heard it before that Charles M. Schulz could be a melancholy man, and I suppose that the correct interpretation can find autobiography in just about any work of art (and I was interested to see those elements identified in the later years of the strip, demonstrating complexity and contemplation in a time when I'm often convinced Schulz was happier)... and yet, I find myself wondering about how everyone can see parts of themselves in the Peanuts characters. Too, I can pick up the fourth volume of "The Complete Peanuts," with its introduction by Jonathan Franzen, which suggests Schulz's character was formed by a greater amount of parental love than some simple thought might think. In brief, it just perhaps offers a more interestingly new interpretation than any particular lengthy biography.

Time for something more cheerful. I bought the latest volume of the Complete Peanuts series a little while ago, and as usual took my time reading through it. I had mentioned how I'd been looking forward to this particular volume for a while now, and just as I'd hoped there were plenty of interesting moments (and a few surprises) along the way.
( 'I've been reading about this baseball stadium that has plastic grass... how come *we* don't have plastic grass?' )

"The Complete Peanuts," with its promise of reprinting all the Peanuts comics strips, may have helped touch off a whole series of efforts to reprint other bits of "Schulz-iana." In the last little while, I've noticed and managed to get a book collecting the "Li'l Folks" cartoon panels Charles M. Schulz drew for a Minnesota newspaper in the late 1940s before getting his big chance, a smaller volume reprinting a little-known sports-themed cartoon panel "It's Only A Game" that ran for about a year in the late 1950s (of which a little more later), and some small books of adages featuring the Peanuts characters reprinted from the 1960s. It may, I suppose, be a sign of a completionist urge, yet one cheap enough to not bother about searching out vintage printings. In any case, though, I've recently managed to pick up another book, titled "Schulz's Youth." I think I've noticed some pointing out that the title might be a little misleading: it's not drawings from Charles M. Schulz's own youth, but a series of cartoon panels featuring teenagers he drew in the 1950s and 1960s, interestingly (or oddly) enough for the small market of his church's magazine. Jerry Scott, writer of the modern comic strip "Zits," contributes a brief foreword to the book commenting that Schulz's youth have good posture and are very polite... and I did have to wonder if their being good churchgoers had a little to do with that.
( 'We disagree theologically.... He thinks he's perfect, and I think he isn't!' )

On Saturday, I took a trip into Toronto. One important goal was to deliver a birthday present to my brother, but on a much less noble note I also knew it was "Free Comic Book Day," and I had heard of one promotional pamphlet that particularly interested me. It was "Unseen Peanuts," a selected compilation with commentary of some of the Peanuts comics that hadn't been reprinted in books between when they first appeared in newspapers and when they helped give "The Complete Peanuts" its name.
( My adventure continues... )

Among all the varied events and feelings that mark the beginning of a new year for me, there's the small question of just what's going to happen with the "Classic Peanuts" reruns this year. When the comic strip ended in 2000, I noted with some interest that reruns would start from the year 1974, when both Woodstock and Marcie were pretty well-defined as characters. Then, at the start of 2001, I squinted at the original copright notices as displayed online, which is where I find them nowadays, and realised they were now rerunning strips from 1973. A little surprised and a little intrigued by that, I started saving the image files.

Every New Year reset the clock one tick backwards. It could be somehow ambiguous to see time reversing itself, but, as the volumes of "The Complete Peanuts" started to come out, I found myself contemplating what moment the book reprints and the online reprints would cross. At the start of last year, though, the strips jumped all the way from the end of 1969 to the start of 1959. Everything looked and felt very different, and all I could do was contemplate that the 1959 strips would also be reprinted in book form in a few months.

At the very end of December, I had my Complete Peanuts books ready. One Sunday page was from 1958, and for a moment I wondered about the strip still hurtling back and back, all the way to "Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!" Yesterday and today, though, I recognised the strips as being from 1960. It may not actually be worth anything one way or another, of course, but it's happened. Also, I happened to notice that today's strip (where Lucy says she never catches snowflakes on her tongue until February or so, and Linus says "They sure look ripe to me!") became an element in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" half a decade later.