There are now a number of different formats but years ago, most Sunday comic strips could be printed two ways — two-tier or full. Charles Schulz, for example, would draw Peanuts as a three-tier strip, meaning three rows of panels…but he'd write it so that the top row could be discarded, and the strip would still make sense. This gave a newspaper the flexibility to run it in a smaller space if that's all they had.
We are all buying the new Complete Peanuts series from Fantagraphics that reprints Mr. Schulz's magnum opus from Day One. They strive to print all the Sunday pages in complete form but as we all noted, one strip in Volume Two was incomplete. The editors could only locate a truncated, two-tier copy of it, which they ran with a promise to keep searching. If, they said, they managed to locate the complete strip — it's the one for 5/3/53 — they would print it in some future volume.
Well, a copy has been found…not a great one but a fuzzy image off microfilm is better than nothing. It will be cleaned up and included, probably not in the next release but in the one after.