Just came across a box that UPS delivered Friday and which my cleaning lady apparently brought in. How nice to find the third volume of The Complete Peanuts, which takes us into the 1955-1956 period. This was when Mr. Schulz really started figuring out what he wanted to do with his characters. Charlie Brown starts to act like Charlie Brown, Lucy starts to act like Lucy, etc. He's still fiddling with their relative ages but as soon as Linus gets a few years older and Sally Brown miraculously develops, we'll be through that era of indecision.
Another nice thing about the strips in this volume is a personal one. As a kid, I avidly collected the Holt, Rinehart and Winston paperbacks of Peanuts strips. They were a dollar each at a little shop called Bookhaven that used to be on Westwood Boulevard, about halfway between Wilshire and Santa Monica. It was a folksy little bookstore run by two older women and it looked like someone's living room. On all but the hottest days, they'd have a fire going in a fireplace, and their dog would be sound asleep next to it. Bookhaven dealt mainly in rentals of current best sellers — books too new to be obtainable at the public library — and my parents went there almost every Saturday to take something back and get something new to read. I'd usually go and if there was a new Peanuts paperback out, or a B.C. collection or anything of the sort, it would be purchased for me, and it would be read over and over and over. I can recall enjoying many of the strips in this new third volume of The Complete Peanuts while sitting in one of those easy chairs in Bookhaven, waiting for my folks to make their selections.
Also nice to see ol' Pig-Pen on the cover. Pig-Pen didn't appear often in the strip, even back then, and it seemed like Schulz would later forget about him for decades at a time. I always liked the character…though I must admit that as a youth, I guess I was laboring under a misperception. Around '68, Schulz introduced Franklin into the strip and the press noted that Peanuts was now integrated; that there was finally a black kid in the neighborhood. I recall reading that and realizing that when I was younger, I'd kind of vaguely assumed that Pig-Pen was a black kid. I'm not sure where I got that impression. Maybe it was the way Schulz drew his hair. Maybe he appeared somewhere in color and they put a lot of brown on him to represent mud. Non-Caucasians have endured some enormously clumsy representations of their skin colors in comic books and strips, including being colored the same as Caucasians, so you never know about some of them. Anyway, I had my great moment of racial awakening when I realized I was mistaken about Pig-Pen, and whenever I see one of those movies where in the last reel, it's revealed that someone has been "passing for white," I think of him. I believe there were one or two early Peanuts strips where I wasn't sure Pig-Pen wasn't a girl, too.
Is there anything I can quibble with about this book? Well, I still think the art direction is a little too much the style of the books' designer, Seth, as opposed to Charles M. Schulz, but I suppose that ship has sailed. Also, the promotion on the Fantagraphics website says that this edition is supposed to contain "an epilogue by series editor Gary Groth," but I can't find one in my copy. Still, the book's a must-have, so I'll just throw in an Amazon link and suggest you click on it.