Product Description

The New York Times best-selling series continues!

As the 1950s close down, Peanuts definitively enters its golden age. Linus, who had just learned to speak in the previous volume, becomes downright eloquent and even begins to fend off Lucy's bullying; even so, his security neurosis becomes more pronounced, including a harrowing two-week "Lost Weekend" sequence of blanketlessness. Charlie Brown cascades further down the hill to loserdom, with spectacularly lost kites, humiliating baseball losses (including one where he becomes "the Goat" and is driven from the field in a chorus of BAAAAHs); at least his newly acquired "pencil pal" affords him some comfort. Pig-Pen, Shermy, Violet, and Patty are also around, as is an increasingly Beethoven-fixated Schroeder.

But the rising star is undoubtedly Snoopy. He's at the center of the most graphically dynamic and action-packed episodes (the ones in which he attempts to grab Linus's blanket at a dead run). He even tentatively tries to sleep on the crest of his doghouse roof once or twice, with mixed results. And his imitations continue apace, including penguins, anteaters, sea monsters, vultures and (much to her chagrin) Lucy. No wonder the beagle is the cover star of this volume! The volume contains 156 strips that have never been reprinted in any book whatsoever, and another 80 that have only been printed in relatively obscure and out-of-print Peanuts books.

And coming up in the next volume… a baby girl named Sally!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138893 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 346 pages

Amazon.com
In the fourth volume in Fantagraphics Books' Complete Peanuts series, Snoopy continues to develop as a character, and the worm--Linus--turns against his fussbudget sister, Lucy. Sure, she's still a fierce intimidator of her little brother and Charlie Brown, but he's learned to strike back with a deft pair of pliers, a huge sand castle or snow dinosaur, or merely the will to walk up and change the channel. Lucy also continues her pursuit of the oblivious musician, Schroeder (contrary to the advice of Dear Agnes). Snoopy continues his impersonations (vulture, penguin, etc.), plays baseball and football, angsts over being called "fuzzy-face or "dime a dozen," and dances gleefully on Schroeder's piano. Charlie Brown, of course, has very little glee, especially when he has to manage a dysfunctional baseball team that only wins if he's sick or when the championship is riding on his catching a simple pop fly. But at least he has his pencil pal. Charles M. Schulz by this time was comfortably in his routine of multi-day stories, and there's a bit of foreshadowing when Schroeder, wildly inventing names of imaginary pianists, comes up with "Joseph Schlabotnik," which would later become the name of CB's baseball hero. The volume has an introduction by author Jonathan Franzen and a Sunday strip from May 3, 1953, which was discovered after the 1953-54 volume was printed. --David Horiuchi

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this fourth volume of Fantagraphics' wildly successful chronological reprinting of Peanuts, the comic strip begins to slide into its most popular form. In these pages, Snoopy is becoming most Snoopy-like, with a wondrously funny vulture sequence; Charlie Brown is hapless and often hopeless while his war with Lucy moves into high gear, and of course Pig-Pen, Patty, and Schroeder are all kicking around. Schulz evolved his characters from week to week, letting their idiosyncratic musings, pratfalls and jokes accumulate. It's possible to flip back a few dozen pages and understand Charlie Brown's emotional evolution. The humanity of both the characters and their creator is the subject of Jonathan Franzen's insightful introduction—certainly the best yet published in the series. Deftly putting to rest the rather trendy theory that Schulz's inner torment gave vent to the psychological dramas in Peanuts, Franzen convincingly makes the case that Schulz was able to accomplish what he did because of a surfeit of love and family. After one has read these pages, full of well-rounded, humane characters, Franzen's theory seems just about right: to create characters so essential and so loveable, Schulz could only have emerged from just such a milieu. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The best-known, most-beloved "kid strip" is, of course, Peanuts, which graced newspaper comics sections for 50 years until artist Charles Schulz's death in 2000. This volume in Fantagraphics' series reprinting the strip's entire run covers 1957 and 1958, by which time its essentials were well established. The characters are what they would continue to be for four more decades: Lucy, bossy and selfish; Linus, quiet and grave; Snoopy, humbly whimsical; and, most important, Charlie Brown, utterly Charlie Brownish. Take that back a bit about Snoopy, who, as novelist Jonathan Franzen points out in the introduction, here begins his transition from recognizably canine ball fetcher and people licker to a near anthropomorph that impersonates other species and plays the violin atop Schroeder's piano ("Little by little," Charlie Brown observes, "that dog seems to be losing his mind"). Schulz's drawing style here is solider than it would be in later years, when the strip grew visually sparer yet even more expressive. Even these early strips, though, put to shame anything in the funny pages today.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Peanuts is alwasy a treat
For a die-hard Peanuts fan, this series is a must-have!

The best comic strip ever?
There was a time when the newspaper comic strip was HUGE. In the early 1900s, the success of a newspaper was in part due to the comics it featured. That era has long since disappeared, and it often seems that the comic strip is a neglected relic. There are still some good comics out there, but they are getting rarer and the newspapers treat them with less and less respect, cramming many onto a single page that used to hold just a few.

Where does Peanuts fit into all this? Well, it is the most popular comic strip of all time. Does any other strip have anything close to its legacy of movies, TV shows, plays, books and merchandise? And happily, it is deserving of its success; it is arguably the best comic strip ever, and certainly one of the top ten or so. As a result, it is not hard to see why the newspapers continue to publish old strips years after its creator, Charles Schulz had died. They don't stop printing it or allow another artist to take it over. The comic strips overall are a pale shadow of what they once were, so repeats of Peanuts can prosper because nothing new can replace them.

Volume 4 of the Complete Peanuts is where the characters are really beginning to show their full development. We have Lucy, the champion fussbudget and Linus, her philosophical brother with a dependence on his security blanket. Schroeder is the budding musical genius. Patty, Violet and Shermy are mostly supporting characters at this point; they will be eventually replaced by other characters (but not in this volume).

The two key roles, however, are those of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Snoopy is up to his usual antics, pretending to be a vulture, grabbing at Linus's blanket and relaxing in his water bowl. He also starts his practice of lying on top of his dog house, although his first attempts are not all that successful. Charlie Brown is, well, Charlie Brown, the ultimate loser who the Fates themselves conspire against. Kites won't fly for him, pens constantly smear and if, by some remote chance, his baseball team is doing okay, they heavens themselves will open up and rain out the game. His "friends" are often cruel to him (with the exception of the benevolent Linus and the aloof Schroeder). In a way, the main theme of Peanuts is defined in the very first strip (in volume 1) when Shermy says, "Good old Charlie Brown...How I hate him." This seems to be the way the whole world thinks of this hapless character.

Peanuts may seem to some to be just an overrated strip, but I don't think that's so. It may be overly merchandised, but the comic itself is a cornerstone of the genre and one of the most influential strips out there. This volume again shows why Peanuts is one of the all-time greats.

Completely Awesome... Peanuts 1957-1958
This series is going to be a regular drain on my bank balance for the coming decade, as that is how long it is going to take Fantagraphics to finish publishing this collection, if they stick to their published schedule.

Be warned: The Sunday strips are not in colour unlike the Calvin & Hobbes and the Farside collection in which even the black and white strips are printed on colour pages. This quite pisses me off...

Finally, a Peanuts collection in chronological order and nothing left out. It's going to be a long wait indeed...

I've always thought of creating a bookshelf of hard cover with all my favourite comic strips, when I could afford them... Calvin & Hobbes, Farside, Tintin, Asterix & of course Peanuts.

I have the first two, and I'm on my way with Peanuts... It's going to be a long and interesting 11 years...