the complete peanuts (or fantagraphics: S/D)

I would say start from the start. It starts out amazingly strong, and Schulz's draftsmanship in the '50s was impeccable.

if you only want a book or two the peak era is late-50s thru the 60s.

Yeah, Fantagraphics do a nice slipcase edition of volumes 5 and 6 (1959 - 1962) in paperback or hardback - probably the box to get if you're only getting one.

It's probably only necessary to own all twenty-six volumes of this if you have a degenerative brain disease (sometimes referred to as 'completism') like me.

I do find the late Peanuts strips a bit dispiriting - Schulz's line visibly deteriorating, going down to three panels, excessive focus on Snoopy and Woodstock, too many fucking strips abt sports - but there are still great sequences well into the 1970s at least. Peppermint Patty doesn't even appear until 1966 for example, well past the generally agreed peak period.

I love Patty but can't actually remember any classic strips I love her in, since the 'greatest hits' type collections I moved on to from the 70s paperbacks leaned heavily on pre-Patty stuff. I think a ton of my affection is based on her animated presentation, especially the way she delivers "Prepare the secret ballot!" in Race For Your Life, Charlie Brown.

I would say start from the start. It starts out amazingly strong, and Schulz's draftsmanship in the '50s was impeccable.

I second this -- there's so much great stuff starting right from the beginning (and going all the way thru the '60s). Also, part of the experience is how the strip evolves.

the first strip alone is worth it

I mean

https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fthebluegrassspecial.com%2Farchive%2F2010%2Foctober10%2Fimagesoct10%2Fpeanuts-first-strip.jpg&f=1

Yeah, I like the really early nihilist stuff which is about the first two or three volumes.

One of my all-time faves:

http://68.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf8iuiARU61qd6rqbo1_1280.jpg

that is 100% gold

@peanuts50yrsago is in 1967 right now.

pic.twitter.com/MkEPfirj3w

— Peanuts On This Day (@Peanuts50YrsAgo) August 3, 2017

Lucy gets it, man

(xpost)

pic.twitter.com/h2n9ueavh8

— Peanuts On This Day (@Peanuts50YrsAgo) July 23, 2017

huh, that's a good strip but weird - lying awake riddled with criss-crossing doubts and worries feels more Charlie Brown than Snoopy to me.

I picked up the fifth volume as directed - I love the annoyed image of Lucy on the right. It's so perfect.

https://i.cubeupload.com/I5mTaN.jpg

Wish I'd been in Seattle for Fantagraphics' yard sale and the Kim Thompson estate sale this past weekend.

yknow one classic peanuts running gag that i love and that nobody ever mentions is linus's completely over-the-top fear of "queen snakes":

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/2/2c/Pe660613.gif/revision/latest?cb=20131206013105

well that came out ridiculously small, but i guess all you need is the "AUGH!!" at the end anyway

God some of these are so fucking brutal it's unbelievable

In a collected edition, you can just turn the page and read a lighter strip about ice skating or something

But imagine reading some desolate Lucy bomb drop on Charlie Brown - then that's your lot, for the rest of the day

NB still funny, though!

I think this is my favourite lighthearted/cute Peanuts strip

http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/186/968/1024/Peanuts1958.10.16.jpg

I keep worrying that these will all sell out by the time I have the money/shelfspace to collect them. I have about seven or eight volumes at the moment. Was rereading one the other night and this one was killing me.

http://www.chronicle.com/blognetwork/edgeofthewest/files/2008/11/27/244094zoom.gif

They've been pretty good about reprinting them, albeit verrrrrrrry slow. But I've found Fantagraphics to be very responsive if you write them directly asking about e.g. their plans to reprint a thing. There's also the softcover editions which are new enough that I expect they're all still in print.

fucking hell

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/6d/5d/d5/6d5dd584e9214741e53fdce4d1e9b5c2.jpg

Schulz has no need for your "Snoopy minus Snoopy"

The Complete Zap Comix on sale for $310 (today only): http://www.fantagraphics.com/the-complete-zap-comix/

Today’s deal (good for another few hours?) is Jaime Hernandez: The Fantagraphics Studio Edition for 33% off.

My son and I were reading the first Complete Peanuts volume, and came to a Charlie Brown & Violet “Let’s play house” strip. My son said “wait a minute,” and pulled a Calvin & Hobbes book off the shelf that he had recently borrowed from a friend. He flipped through and found a Calvin & Susie “Let’s play house...” strip with a very similar joke (the kids emulate messy adulthood too closely). Watterson was probably paying direct tribute to Schulz. Anyway, I thought it was cool that my son happened to pick up on it (he tried it again later with two “bathtime” strips that weren’t such a close match).

When we read these early strips together, I sometimes do this dumb thing where I point out instances of Schulz “padding out” a one- or two-panel gag into four panels — marking time with duplicative dialogue, Charlie Brown muttering to himself, etc. (The lesson is reinforced by a Lil’ Folks book we have, that has actual, side-by-side examples of Schulz expanding a one-panel LF gag into a Peanuts strip later on.)

I don’t know why I find it necessary to train my kid to read strips like some kind of critic-in-training — though I was proud tonight when I asked him to pick out the single panel in a Sunday strip that contained the entire joke, and he did it easily.

(For the record, I also point out how other/most strips use the entire four panels to develop the joke.)

(Also for the record — this was the Sunday strip in question.)

Man, the drawing on that is so gorgeous.

He just showed me a strip where Snoopy is worried about getting in trouble, and imagines himself in an electric chair. "I don't get what Snoopy is thinking." I said, don't worry about it.

I dig Fanta's new look: https://blog.fantagraphics.com/fantagraphics-a-new-improved-look/

Has anyone been reading L&R Vol. 4 (the individual issues)? I'm waiting for the collections to be published.

Also, I'll put this here (FG has published a few Nancy collections) –

I think Bushmiller can be great, but I don't quite get the cartoonist/critic obsession with Nancy. The 1959 strip deconstructed in that famous essay is... fine? It's not one I would have ranked among the top strips (and even the analysis, while impressive, doesn't quite convince me).

I've read the essays and stuff, but feel like picking apart what makes the strip great is sort a case of dissecting the frog, you know?

Like, Bushmiller's gags can be great and the strip was pleasingly "minimalist" and "reduced to its essence," or whatever. Beyond that, it's all just sort of elaboration of the obvious.

Nothing wrong with learning frog (or any other) anatomy.

<3 this panel

https://i.imgur.com/QxHqymh_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

My son asked me to explain this strip; I read it and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!”

Which date?

Oh, sorry, thought I had linked directly. Jan. 5, 1958

Lol the more things change

He also asked about this strip (think I got the link right this time)—which was a segue into discussing some stuff we’ve talked about a little in the past, but which I’m never really “ready” to tackle.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/peanuts/images/8/83/19540503.gif/revision/latest?cb=20130630140841

Sorry, don’t think that’s working. May 3, 1954

https://peanuts.fandom.com/wiki/May_1954_comic_strips

9/9/58 cracks me up.

So does 8/28/58.

Schulz could be razor-sharp sometimes.

it gets into really fundamentally thorny/sticky questions of archiving/publication/preservation in the form of consumer goods imo. not everything we'd like to see immortalized will bear the supply/demand equation of a comprehensive publication regime at any particular moment. very few things, today. and maybe some works are actually better served not by complete publications, but by, say having complete collections in library/archive contexts, and only very carefully curated "best of" volumes put together for publication and enabling people to discover them and understand why they matter(ed), and fall in love with them. of course, deciding what "deserves" that treatment is a problem that never goes away. but the absolute mountain of pop culture in the rearview only gets bigger with each passing year, and we can't count on it being solely the job of Fanta-esque publishers to handle it. and even if they did, eventually those volumes will become scarce and rare and the work would have to be done again in fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, if Nancy and Peanuts still matter to people then.

My son is committed to getting the entire run of Peanuts books (we’re currently up to ’78), despite the decline in humor in later years.

eventually those volumes will become scarce and rare and the work would have to be done again in fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, if Nancy and Peanuts still matter to people then

And the stuff will be public domain at some point, which will change the equation in certain ways (both good and bad).

I’m glad I encountered Krazy Kat as a kid in the form of the few best-of volumes, and not some voluminous complete library (which likely would’ve turned me off).

Berke Breathed made a joke at some point about not needing to reprint the Bloom County collections, because half the country has moldy copies of those books in their bathroom.

books going out of print has been a challenge to readers for approx 519 years now, one impecunious publisher of niche material, run out of a leaky house next to an interstate, is unlikely to innovate a solution

(getting fifteen deep into a single series of softcover-replacing-hardcover comics reprints might be a North American first though tbf? for that matter, Cochran's EC Library is the only NA complete hardcover series I can think of longer than Fanta's Peanuts.)

They managed to innovate a solution to the (non-)problem of me not normally getting uncomfortably aroused by the back half of a retail catalog in my teenage years.

circa 2003, I picked up three or four random volumes of the NBM/Bill Blackbeard reprints of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy at two or three bucks a pop. they were immensely fun to read through once, and gave me a good sense of that comic that's still vivid today. but to collect beyond that seemed insane --- there were 18 volumes of those things! i never saw a single other one at any store anywhere! and why bother tracking down just one or two? it was like, completism or nothing. so for my needs, a single fancy treasury that gathered only the greatest epic storylines, with a section in the back introducing the formative early gag-strip years, would have been perfect. and yet, massive kudos to them for accomplishing that project, true comics-historical heroism.

They managed to innovate a solution to the (non-)problem of me not normally getting uncomfortably aroused by the back half of a retail catalog in my teenage years.

the cover hadn't gotten you started?

https://i.imgur.com/xsPimTE.jpg