A PEANUTS FAN'S DELIGHT

With The Complete Peanuts: 1979-1980 (340 6.5x8.5-inch landscape pages, b/w; hardcover, $28.99), Fantagraphics’ landmark series reprinting all of Charles M. Schulz’s masterwork reaches the fifteenth volume. Published at the rate of two volumes a year, without fail, each book a quiet triumph of understated design by Seth. This volume begins with a Foreword by tv’s Al Roker, who was the last to interview Schulz as the cartoonist was slowly, day by day, dying.

Roker tells us he was a comic strip fan since he was seven, when he discovered Peanuts. He dreamed of becoming a cartoonist (or, “better, an animator”) and clipped and saved Peanuts, pasting them up in a notebook in strict chronological order and rejoicing when, at the age of 12, he saw Franklin, a kid who looked like him—i.e., an African American—arrive in the strip in July 1968. By then, Roker had discovered the Fawcett-Crest reprints of the strip, realizing that “somebody” had stolen his idea, collecting all the strips in book form.

The book, as all its predecessors, concludes with an exhaustive index to the content and a short biography of Schulz by publisher Gary Groth. This massive archive-worthy reprint project has only twenty years to go, ten more volumes. Three strips to a page, every page dated. A historian’s dream. A Peanuts fan’s delight.

Comments

[David]

I'm not a fan of Schulz's later work. Peanuts fell off after the mid seventies. I actually think the new Peanuts graphic novel "Happiness is a Warm Blanket" is better and closer in spirit to 1960s Peanuts than anything Schulz himself did from the late seventies onward. Peanuts in the 90s was in sad shape indeed!