The Complete Peanuts: 1955 to 1956 - Charles Schulz
There was a brief period, sometime during college, when I disliked Peanuts and thought it was inane, that Schulz was getting senile and should have stopped drawing comics years ago. But it didn't last long, and aside from that short time of infidelity, I've really enjoyed reading Peanuts. Growing up, my dad had several of the little paperback collections in which he'd underlined particular words (probably new English words for him) or copied a character here and there. A lot of the comics in this collection are ones that I've seen before, but they're mixed in with quite a few that I don't remember at all. It's still in the earlier years of Peanuts, when the characters start looking more or less the way we think of them now, but Snoopy is still making the transition from his more dog-like appearance.
It's interesting to read them now, because I'm sure I didn't get a lot of the jokes when I was younger. How much would I really have understood Linus' fixation on his blanket or Charlie Brown's self-esteem issues? And then there's Lucy's miseducation of Linus, where she tells him ridiculous theories while Charlie Brown looks on and groans. Linus' "Bang!" phase is pretty humorous, when he responds to Lucy's bossiness by shooting her, as is his oft-quoted response: "500 years from now, who'll know the difference?"
It's a wonderful collection which really shows why Peanuts had such lasting popularity.
Fed to jonathan's brain | July 21, 2005
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