The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: Vol. 4 Hardcover Edition (Vol. 4) (The Complete Peanuts)
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The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: Vol. 4 Hardcover Edition (Vol. 4) (The Complete Peanuts) Details
Amazon.com Review In the fourth volume in Fantagraphics Books' Complete Peanuts series, Snoopy continues to develop as a character, and the worm--Linus--turns against his fussbudget sister, Lucy. Sure, she's still a fierce intimidator of her little brother and Charlie Brown, but he's learned to strike back with a deft pair of pliers, a huge sand castle or snow dinosaur, or merely the will to walk up and change the channel. Lucy also continues her pursuit of the oblivious musician, Schroeder (contrary to the advice of Dear Agnes). Snoopy continues his impersonations (vulture, penguin, etc.), plays baseball and football, angsts over being called "fuzzy-face or "dime a dozen," and dances gleefully on Schroeder's piano. Charlie Brown, of course, has very little glee, especially when he has to manage a dysfunctional baseball team that only wins if he's sick or when the championship is riding on his catching a simple pop fly. But at least he has his pencil pal. Charles M. Schulz by this time was comfortably in his routine of multi-day stories, and there's a bit of foreshadowing when Schroeder, wildly inventing names of imaginary pianists, comes up with "Joseph Schlabotnik," which would later become the name of CB's baseball hero. The volume has an introduction by author Jonathan Franzen and a Sunday strip from May 3, 1953, which was discovered after the 1953-54 volume was printed. --David Horiuchi Read more From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In this fourth volume of Fantagraphics' wildly successful chronological reprinting of Peanuts, the comic strip begins to slide into its most popular form. In these pages, Snoopy is becoming most Snoopy-like, with a wondrously funny vulture sequence; Charlie Brown is hapless and often hopeless while his war with Lucy moves into high gear, and of course Pig-Pen, Patty, and Schroeder are all kicking around. Schulz evolved his characters from week to week, letting their idiosyncratic musings, pratfalls and jokes accumulate. It's possible to flip back a few dozen pages and understand Charlie Brown's emotional evolution. The humanity of both the characters and their creator is the subject of Jonathan Franzen's insightful introduction—certainly the best yet published in the series. Deftly putting to rest the rather trendy theory that Schulz's inner torment gave vent to the psychological dramas in Peanuts, Franzen convincingly makes the case that Schulz was able to accomplish what he did because of a surfeit of love and family. After one has read these pages, full of well-rounded, humane characters, Franzen's theory seems just about right: to create characters so essential and so loveable, Schulz could only have emerged from just such a milieu. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist The best-known, most-beloved "kid strip" is, of course, Peanuts, which graced newspaper comics sections for 50 years until artist Charles Schulz's death in 2000. This volume in Fantagraphics' series reprinting the strip's entire run covers 1957 and 1958, by which time its essentials were well established. The characters are what they would continue to be for four more decades: Lucy, bossy and selfish; Linus, quiet and grave; Snoopy, humbly whimsical; and, most important, Charlie Brown, utterly Charlie Brownish. Take that back a bit about Snoopy, who, as novelist Jonathan Franzen points out in the introduction, here begins his transition from recognizably canine ball fetcher and people licker to a near anthropomorph that impersonates other species and plays the violin atop Schroeder's piano ("Little by little," Charlie Brown observes, "that dog seems to be losing his mind"). Schulz's drawing style here is solider than it would be in later years, when the strip grew visually sparer yet even more expressive. Even these early strips, though, put to shame anything in the funny pages today. Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more Review “The Complete Peanuts confronts us afresh with what a brilliant, truly modern and totally weird idea it was to create a comic strip about a chronically depressed child.” - Time“As essential as pop texts get.” - The Onion“Consider replacing those tattered old Peanuts paperbacks with this definitive series.” - Booklist“What more can I say about these wonderful collections? I’ve enjoyed each one immensely so far; they make me laugh and grin and even smirk a little from time to time... Top notch book. You can’t have a much better time than reading these collections. Highly recommended.” - Todd Klein, comic book letterer, designer, and writer Read more About the Author Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google). In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course, and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post―as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit. He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts―and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate.) The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952. Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day―and the day before his last strip was published―having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand―an unmatched achievement in comics.Jonathan Franzen is a National Book Award and James Tait Black Memorial Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Read more
Reviews
Well, a little disappointed as I thought this was the FINAL volume in the series, but then I read the word "penultimate" on the bookjacket and after a little research discovered there will one more book in the series (Vol. 26) that collects rarities, demo strips and other non-strip related Peanuts art. That being said, it's a little bittersweet to have completed the entire strip in collection -- minus one missing strip from 1957 I believe that was not in the archive and no one has been able to find a copy (to the best of my knowledge - the publisher of this series said they would be publish it in a future volume if it was ever found). But this is still a fitting end (almost). My only quibble with this release concerns the final Sunday panel that was published 9 hours after Schulz's passing. In the original color strip, there are (I assume) digitally imposed images of past scenes in the blank space above Snoopy's (read: Schulz's) final typed words. I know this because I saved the strip from my copy of that Sunday paper. I also still get misty-eyed and the lump forms in my throat when I read that final strip and those words in bold typeface: "Dear Friends...Truth be told, I bawled like a baby after reading it initially over 16 years ago, especially after learning Schulz had died the night before. In fact, Charles Schulz is one of the three "celebrity" deaths I have ever cried over as if I lost a member of my own family. Fred Rogers and Dick Clark are the other two. Perhaps there was some subconscious "avuncular" association I had with these 3 individuals - like they were the favorite old uncles who were nonthreatening and wise in their own ways. Mr. Rogers was, of course, a major part of my early childhood along with Sesame Street and the Electric Company (even though admittedly some of his stuff seems pretty sappy looking back with adult hindsight but I still think he genuinely cared about children and their feelings), and Dick Clark helped to inform me of rock and popular music as I came of musical age in the late 70's/early 80's via American Bandstand, and countless Rockin' New Year Eves. I am of the firm belief that one establishes his/her musical tastes during their tween years and I happened to enter that during the Punk/New Wave explosion (and I still like the music from that era - not the crap it mutated into by 1985 - by then I was well on my way to what would soon be called alternative/college radio music).However, throughout my childhood and into my adult life, the one constant by was Charles Schulz and Peanuts, either via the daily comic strip or the TV specials (which still continue to air on Broadcast Television), the books, the greeting cards, the stuffed Snoopys, the Christmas ornaments, even the Met Life commercials. So thanks to Fantagraphics and the Schulz family for archiving and allowing this collection to be made available to the public. I look forward to purchasing the FINAL volume in October and then my collection will be more or less complete!
