Follow the battle of Snoopy and the Red Baron. As the Snoopy takes on the Red Baron first seen in "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown." ( )

I just re-read this, I think for the first time since the late 70s, when I borrowed it from a library..

It's adapted from the Peanuts newspaper comic of the time, a simplification of the long sequence of strips, which continued intermittently over many years (most of them after this book was published), in which Snoopy fantasises that he is a World War I flying ace, occasionally integrating the other Peanuts characters into his fantasy.

Snoopy's fantasies, including these Red Baron fantasies, reveal more than any other strips Schulz's greatness not only as an artist, but as a writer. In these strips and others like them he emulates the stories and style of various genres. The economy of words forced by the limited space of the newspaper comic panel, led him to a kind of prose poem perfectness, with not a word too many or too few.

As has been observed elsewhere, Snoopy and the Red Baron is the quintessential war novel, incorporating in its few hundred words (are there even that many?) all the major plot, characters and 'colour' to be found in many a long-winded epic. All the while it plays subtle games with narrative, smoothly segueing from the literal -- Snoopy on his doghouse, fantasising -- to Snoopy's point-of-view as he imagines journeying across a desolate World War I France of barbed wire and ruined farmhouses. Constantly we are reminded that this is a fantasy, or perhaps a story Snoopy is telling us about himself. At least once he breaks the fourth wall to directly address us as if he is aware he is telling us this story.

But when I look back on it, even just minutes after putting it down, what story do I remember most vividly? An anthropomorphic dog having a fantasy? A World War I flying ace shot down behind enemy lines? Although the fantasy is only presented literally for a short time, that aspect of the story seems to linger more potently in the memory, perhaps saying something about how ready we are -- or I am -- to grasp an attractive fantasy. ( )

Snoopy flies his doghouse - turned Sopwith Camel - to fight the Red Baron.

According to the Myers-Briggs test, Snoopy & I score the same. I don't know, Snoopy seems much more daring. I have a clean 1966 copy of this one, which I really cherish. Love it! ( )

That daring WWI fighter ace Snoopy tangles with the dastardly Red Baron during heroic missions. He can never quite get the slippery scarlet flyer though.

http://graphicsf.blogspot.com/2006/12... ( )

As the blurb on the back inside cover says "This is the war novelist's war novel". It's all encapsulated here - the excitement and horrors of war, the bravery, the loves won and lost.

Every Snoopy fan needs a copy of this book. Luckily i came across a free copy of the 1966 hardcover. Truly, a timeless classic. ( )