The Complete Peanuts: 1953-1954 Dailies & Sundays

A collection of the early years years of Charles Schulz's comic strip, Peanuts. This is such a great series and is such a huge part of Americana that it feels almost necessary to take a look at its beginnings. And the beginnings are good; the characters aren't exactly what they are today, but it is already evident how they may develop to be the characters in the guise we now know and love.

Peanuts is obviously on its way to becoming a great strip, an iconic strip, but after reading 5 years' worth in a big gulp, it really does get repetitive. The characters are more caricatures than characters--there's no emotional depth to them, really, but just rough shapes. Charlie Brown has a big ego and yet is insecure; Lucy is a fussbudget; Violet makes mud pies. It's a lot of the same, rephrased and recycled.

Thank god Charlotte Braun didn't last, though.

The strip is certainly more recognizable than the first volume, but there are still some things you eventually won't see; adults and Snoopy talking the most glaring. I have to say that I love Lucy and think she's by far the strip's most amusing character. I'm surprised as there are a few repeated jokes, but most of them are fun and enjoyable.

The second volume of Fantagraphic's ambitious project to reprint the complete "Peanuts" comic strips, this collection begins to show more flashes of the brilliance that would be a frequent hallmark of the strip in later years. The artwork is still pretty pedestrian, and most of the gags are still pretty lame, but all is improving. This collection introduces Pig-Pen, and Lucy's long-standing crush on a suddenly more mature Schroeder begins here. There is an atypical sequence in which Lucy is on the verge of winning a grown ladies' golf tournament, and page 113 features a particularly funny cartoon which I now realize was almost directly lifted by Bill Watterson for one of his best "Calvin and Hobbes" strips.

Another one in this great series. I have been borrowing them from the library, but I would not mind owning them. They are great reads, and a nice way to see how the characters evolved.

The one where Linus gets his blanket.

Charles Schulz taught me to read. What better gift?