Robert Faires writes to ask about the Peanuts reprints that are currently being made available to newspapers…
Sometime in the last week or two, Peanuts jumped way back in time. I don't really recall what time frame the strips were in before the jump — early to mid-seventies, I'd guess — but now they look to be late fifties/early sixties, and considerably earlier than the period of strips when they started the "classic" repeats around the time of Schulz's illness and passing. It's not that I mind at all, since I actually like the era these strips are from better than the seventies and later, when the characters and humor took a turn that didn't work as well for me, but it struck me as a curious move, one that kind of came out of nowhere, and I wondered if you had any reaction to it.
Well, the first thing that needs to be explained here is that United Feature Syndicate offers two different groups of vintage strips to its subscribing newspapers. One set is from the nineties (though it hasn't always proceeded in sequence) and the other started with 1974 strips and then jumped back to 1973 strips and then to 1972 and so on. The idea here as I understand it is that some papers wanted the older strips and were willing to deal with the fact that they have different proportions than most modern-day strips. Some weren't and so they run strips from after Mr. Schulz adjusted his dimensions to match everyone else's.
Anyway, the older package was in the middle of a 1969 storyline about Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy going to a sports banquet to meet the round-headed kid's hero, Joe Shlabotnik. On January 1, they suddenly abandoned that story and hopped from 1969 to 1959. (Today's strip is from January 10, 1959.) My reaction? I think it would be neater if they'd started in the late fifties and worked forward but it's all wonderful stuff. As we'll probably all discover after Fantagraphics has more of its wonderful Peanuts archive books out, it's quite arguable when the strip "got good." A lot of it depends on how you take to the gradual humanization of Snoopy and the focus on his fantasies. Some thought that was when the strip stopped being about children…and of course, others thought it was never about children. Personally, I thought Schulz began to hit repetitive patches in the seventies so that was never the ideal place to start. In a sense, I thought the last ten or twelve years of strips were better than the ten or twelve years that preceded them but they're all worthy of another look.