Posted on April 15th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Words, Comedy, Cartoons.
For my birthday, my parents gave me the first boxed set -- the first two books -- of The Complete Peanuts, eventually to comprise 25 volumes.
I've been overflowing with thoughts about these strips, and I'm going to have to break it up into several posts. The first observation: Wow, Fantagraphics has done a magnificent job on these books. They have gorgeous dustjackets, and the book covers are covered with cartoon figures: the first volume is all Charlie Brown, the second one all Lucy. There are introductions by Garrison Keillor and Walter Cronkite, and an excellent lengthy interview with Schulz from The Comics Journal.
Best of all, though, are the indices, which feature not just appearances of the characters but of countless gags and features important to the strip, and it's a revelation just how many of them there are, how many things we associate with Peanuts. Just from the first two volumes, index entries include first appearances of "blockhead", the bust of Beethoven, the security blanket, "good grief", checkers, coconut (distastefulness of), "fussbudget", kite-flying, "wishy-washy", mud pies, etc.
Golf is as important to the early Peanuts strips as baseball.
Did you know that Lucy wasn't the first to pull the football away from Charlie Brown? It was Violet.
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