The Complete Peanuts 1979-1980

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Complete Peanuts 1979-1980 (Volume 15) (Fantagraphics, 2011).



I have to say, my enthusiasm for this series is not as high as it was two or three years ago, but the arrival of each new volume is still a wonderful thing. Fantagraphics has passed the halfway point, and their choice of celebrities to write the forewords is as weird as ever. Al Roker, of all people, introduces this one, and he doesn't seem to have anything to say about the actual content of Peanuts at the end of the 1970s.

There's still an agreeable edge to the series at this point - Peppermint Patty's resigned acceptance to a life of D-minuses is really kind of savage - but Charles Schulz was relaxed enough to enjoy a few in-jokes and celebrity shout-outs to the likes of Bill Mauldin and various tennis stars. Most of the supporting cast have drifted completely offscreen by this point, and he hasn't found much to do with any of his new characters. There's a girl named Eudora in several strips in this book, and she only seems to function as somebody who silently stands around while Snoopy's World War One Flying Ace speaks French, badly, towards her. Woodstock picks up four fellow birds - Beagle Scouts - who don't accomplish much beyond a recurring punch line about angel food cake.

Still, when Schulz was on, which was most of the time, there's still enough surreal moments and beautiful artwork to make up for the feeling of complacency among the cast. Taking a few moments to study just how Schulz would draw Lucy at her crabbiest always results in me laughing out loud, and there's a sequence where Schroeder, hoping to attend a music camp, allows himself to be "flown" by doghouse, which is revealed to be extremely funny when we learn that Schroeder's the only one who is not in on the joke. Each time that Schulz started one of his longer, weirder stories like this, readers will find themselves wondering how in the world he resolved it. He succeeded every single time. Surely not the best of the Peanuts volumes, but nevertheless happily recommended.

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 (Fantagraphics, 2010)



I don't know that I'll do another entry on a Fantagraphics Peanuts collection on these pages, because they're really quite difficult to write. ("More of the same great comic strips!") The publisher is now halfway through the reprint program, and this is the first book that covers the material that I might have first read in the Sunday funnies of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution when I was a kid.

I think this is the first of the Fantagraphics books to make readers a little wary of the decline in Schulz's work that would come in the nineties; this is the book that introduces some of Snoopy's relations. I don't know about you, but there's only so much Spike that I'm interested in reading, and I think all of it was published by about 1981. In the mid-seventies, however, Schulz was still at the top of his game and putting together some ridiculous and hilarious storylines.

Probably the best of them sees the perpetually clueless Peppermint Patty getting tired of her school and unwittingly ends up enrolled in an obedience school for dogs. In another high point, Marcie spends an entire summer camp beating up some boy. Why on earth Schulz thought Snoopy needed kinfolk at all with those two causing such enjoyable havoc, we'll never know. Recommended.

Peanuts 1965-1966 and Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 09

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



Among the treats in this eighth collection: the debut of Peppermint Patty, who's even more confident in her cluelessness than you remember, a never-before-reprinted sequence about Snoopy journeying off to be the keynote speaker at a Daisy Hill Puppy Farm convention and not arriving, and the first several sequences with the World War One flying ace. Probably recommended higher than any of these other super volumes, really.



Oh, there's a whole bunch of great stuff in this collection of 50 episodes from 1985-86, featuring really great art from all those names you see below in the tag. It starts with "Midnight Surfer," one of the all-time greats, and ends with the breathtaking "Riders on the Storm," Brendan McCarthy's first Dredd in the way-out style he's known for. Recommended!

(Originally posted February 21, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)