Product Description: The New York Times best-selling series continues!
The Complete Peanuts will run 25 volumes, collecting two years chronologically at a rate of two a year for twelve years. Each volume is designed by the award-winning cartoonist Seth (It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken) and features impeccable production values; every single strip from Charles M. Schulz's 50-year American classic is reproduced better than ever before.
Amazon.com Review: By 1961-62, "Peanuts" was truly the comic strip that we all still know and love, with situations and sayings that would cement its place as one of the most memorable literary creations of all time. Linus is firmly center stage, and if not for baseball would probably eclipse Charlie Brown in status. His efforts to defend his blanket are legendary (Lucy buries it and turns it into a kite), he gets glasses, and his favorite teacher, Miss Othmar (now known as Mrs. Hagemeyer) returns, which leads to some consternation when he (1) learns that she's accepting money to teach and (2) tells her he'll give up his blanket if she gives up biting her fingernails. There's a new character, Frieda with the naturally curly hair, and her floppy cat strikes terror throughout the neighborhood. Oh, about that baseball team. Everyone quits when Schroeder gives up baseball for Beethoven (leading CB to take out a personal ad to manage another team), they decide their pep talk is making them hypocrites, and Linus is assigned to scout the opposing team. As much as "Peanuts" is a reflection of its era ("Why couldn't McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?"), it also had a self-awareness as a comic strip (Linus: "The most recent criticism is that there is too little action and far too much talking in the modern-day comic strip. What do you think about this?" CB: "Ridiculous!") that proved just how far Charles M. Schulz was ahead of his time. With fellow pianist Schroeder on the cover, Diana Krall wrote this volume's introduction. --David Horiuchi
Forget your Snoopy-doll, this is dark humor...and yet so lighthearted By the early 1960's, Charles Schulz truly reached his peak as a cartoonist, both in terms of verbal and visual creativity. All of the characters have fully matured into what we remember them for: Charlie Brown is as depressed as ever, having fallen in love with the mysterious red-haired girl and losing one baseball game after another; Schroeder hates himself for forgetting Beethoven's birthday; Linus, who for a brief time here appears in glasses, drags his blanket around everywhere, while his sister Lucy keeps busy as the neighborhood psychiatrist and appears crabbier every day (although Violet's sarcasm makes her a vital competitor, which is probably a major reason why she appears less and less; Schulz may have figured that it simply became too much for poor Charlie Brown!). Snoopy has not yet started to walk on two legs on a permanent basis, but his colorful imagination, his charm and his commentary on both the human and animal condition is so evident now that he's almost turned into the center point of the strip. His feather-friend Woodstock is still many years ahead, but the dog has already become well aqcuainted with the bird's relatives. There are really too many gems here to single out any particular episodes, but I guess my top favorites include Snoopy's rather heartbreaking friendships with snowmen (after all, the guys are melting within a few weeks...), Sally's first day (or final pre-days) as a kindergarten child, as well as when Linus' blanket disappears into the sky after his seemingly insensitive sister had used it as a kite. Another hilarious sequence stars the annoying new girl Freida, who causes heavy distress for Snoopy when she appears with a cat. Freida would soon turn into just another cameo character, but in this book she proves that she certainly attributed a few things into the strip for a brief time.
One of the many things that make Peanuts so entertaining and fascinating to me, is how I see myself in the shoes of the characters. Not so much in the situations that occur in their lives, but rather in the feelings of embarassment, frustration and, once in a while, joy that these situations evoke. No, I don't cry when snowmen melt, I've never lost a blanket and I can't even remember my first day in kindergarten, but when Snoopy, Linus and Sally express the difficulty of going through such things they could just as well have described the anxieties and fears of my own life. I don't think I'm the only one who recognize myself in Linus' exclaimation: "I can't face life unarmed!"--his "weapon," of course, being the blanket. Sadly, these days most people regard PEANUTS as a cute children's strip, but you need to go no further than this book to get convinced that this impression is bloody false. That's not to say that children won't like the strip, though.
Handing down to a new generation I used to read all these strips when they were in paperback form. I remember being around 12 or 13 and pouring over them again and again, with the added luxury of checking out the action every day in the daily paper. It's very gratifying, now that my six-year old daughter is reading, to share these volumes with her and watch her lose herself among the pages, and then ask to be quizzed on the many special characteristics of the kids in Charlie Brown's neighborhood. The printing quality is extremely high, the panels are crystal clear and the detail is really sumptuous.
My favorite so far is the Sunday strip where Charlie Brown is attempting to fly a kite in heavy wind and his cap keeps getting blown off, which he doggedly replaces atop his head every time. In the end Linus posits this classic: "I have a suggestion. Why don't you wear the kite and fly your hat?" I long for the day when we will have the collected volumes, and the prices on Amazon reallyl cannot be beat. But I must say, I miss those cheap little paper back volumes from my early youth. Rats!
Who doesn't love Snoopy and Charlie Brown? If you already bought the previous releases of this collection, you know exactly what you'll find inside: intelligence, emotion and depth of the human relations.
Here you will get some of the Peanuts smartest movements, just like when Snoopy is locked under an ice piece and starts a reflection of his own life or when Linus sees himself without the safety of his blanket.
Even if you prefer the "modern version" of the strips (with Spike, Woodstock, the Red Baron, school scenes and stuff which would appear later, more precisely in the 70's), in this issue, you may find some of the roots and the reasons for the diamond that Charles M. Schulz carved on his life.
Thank you Charles, you really changed my life with these "guys" and "The Complete Peanuts 1961-1962" is another jewel from the master.
A definite must for the refined collector I bought all the items in the series and found them simply irresistible. The strips are the integral version by the great master himself, Charles M. Schulz, and the edition is very, very good, with a robust hardcover and classy paper.
A special note for Italian speaking people: these are the "integral" strips, not the censored ones published for many years in Italy, where the religious quotations and remarks were systematically erased.
How consistant can you get? This volume of The Complete Peanuts cover the years 1961 and 1962 in their entireties. The most noteworthy event of this book is the introduction of Frieda, the girl with the "naturally curly hair". Soon after her debut, the running gag where Frieda tries to get Snoopy to chase rabbits is used for the first time. Also introduced at this time was Frieda's cat Faron, who only made a few appearances before disappearing. Many of the jokes from this volume were later used in Peanuts television specials, most notably the Christmas and Halloween specials. Peanuts was one of the greatest comic strips of all time, and 1961 and 1962 are certainly among it's best years. Highly recommended.
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