The Complete Peanuts - 1959 to 1960 product reviews

A masterpiece, I loved it!
These classic comic strips from the pen of Charles M. Schulz are as humorous and relevant today as when they were penned 49-50 years ago.

This book is definitely worth buying and KEEPING (and protecting from humour-hounds with grubby paws). I read quite a lot of 'Peanuts' when I was younger, including collected re-prints, yet many of the strips in this book were new to me.

This 5th book in The Complete Peanuts series is an important collector's volume. Several key features are established in this period: Charlie Brown's sister Sally is born - though he is delighted at first, her arrival serves to further accentuate his 'depressed rejected' character, we already get to see the beginnings of Sally's role to portray 'unrequited love' (toward Linus); Lucy sets up her psychiatric practice (and continues her fruitless pursuit of Schroeder), and Snoopy starts sleeping on top of his doghouse instead of in it (and finds fiendish delight in becoming the elusive 'mad punter').

Whilst the many baseball and 'great pumpkin' references are perhaps a little more pertinent to American society - the very human (and dog) experiences through all of the cartoons are universal in any modern society.

Footnote (gleaned from a section at the back of the book, by Gary Groth):
Schulz was born in 1922 and his first 'Peanuts' daily appeared October 2, 1950. Although, between 1948-1950 he had succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post, as well as a weekly comic feature in his local St Pauls Pioneer Press called "Li'l Folks". It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for 2 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. But he started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates...

...and the rest is history. He subsequently became one of the most famous cartoonists, ever!!! There is probably a moral about never giving up in there somewhere....

Presumably, Schulz would rather his cartoons had continued to be called Li'l Folks, but according to Groth, the newspaper syndicate 'imposed' the name 'Peanuts' and that's what stuck! Apparently it was a name Schulz himself loathed to his dying day on Feb 12th 2000.