The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960 by Charles M. Schulz

I have an uneasy relationship with re-reading books: it feels like cheating, sometimes, to someone who spent a couple of decades in the book-mines. (If you're not at the coal-face digging out new material, what good are you?) On the other hand, there's a lot of things I read long ago and don't remember well: the old Heraclitian thing about steps and rivers is true. On top of that, I don't want to repeat myself here, and I write a post about every book I read, for complicated flaw-in-my-character reasons.

Anyway, I have a couple of random Complete Peanuts books on my to-be-read shelves; I had them before, read them, and lost them in my 2011 flood. Am I trying to rebuy the whole series? I don't think so. But ask me again in ten years if I keep filling in the gaps.

So I just reread The Complete Peanuts, 1959 to 1960, relatively early in the fifty-year run of that strip, entirely and famously by creator Charles M. Schulz. I did have a post on this book way back in the early years of this blog, but I'm happy (?) to see that it was just a signpost, the way I often did in those days. I'll also link to the posts on the first and last volumes collecting the series, which in turn link to lots and lots of others.

Reading these two years of strips this time, I thought how purely it encapsulated that era of Peanuts - an era I haven't written about as much. The very early Peanuts strips are electric and punchy, with that famous "How I hate him" first strip, but they quickly change tone and the character of Charlie Brown shifts to his permanent form. Later in the life of the strip, there was the era of long continuities and persistent sadness, from the '60s through the mid-'70s, which was followed by the much sunnier Snoopy-centric era that continued, with changes and more new characters, through the end of the strip in 2000.

1959 and 1960, though, are in the age when the continuities are starting to expand, but haven't hit their full extent yet. Lucy is a pest sometimes - she's already started yanking the football away every year - but is still a little kid, and hasn't entirely transformed into the avatar of Schulz's first wife that many commentators assume she was later in the '60s. The world is just starting to expand outward at this point: Snoopy is getting odder and quirkier, but he's still a dog, albeit one who can sleep on the top of his doghouse. Linus has his crush on his teacher, Miss Othmar - who, of course, we never see, like all Peanuts adults. He also comes up with The Great Pumpkin in 1959, and suffers the first of many disappointments - maybe his pumpkin patch wasn't sincere enough.

The era I'm claiming this is the epitome of is the ramp-up era, I suppose: the time where Schulz was assembling the gags and running jokes and ideas that he would ring changes on for decades to come. (All this is in retrospect, of course: some running gags die out, like Pig-Pen, and Schulz couldn't have known which ideas would be durable enough to return to every year and which would be just fine for a one-shot.)

He's also still adding characters, but that continued throughout the life of the strip: some stuck around for a while (like Pig-Pen), some had only a brief life (like the later Charlotte Braun and Molly Volley), and some became part of the core cast quickly (like Peppermint Pattie and Marcie, a few years later). 1960 saw one of the latter: Charlie Brown's little sister Sally, first an off-camera arrival, then an infant pushed around in a stroller, and finally a walking and talking member of the cast. In this volume, she starts her crush on Linus, who is at this point five years older than she is. (That will change over time; ages are flexible things in Peanuts and mostly tend to shake down to slightly-older kids and slightly-younger kids, who seem to be a year apart at best.)

You can always read Peanuts on an entertainment level, and it's excellent that way - it wouldn't have lasted fifty years and been beloved by millions if it didn't. But it's also fascinating to dig in a little more, and examine how Schulz build his running gags and tweaked his characters over the years, how be built a fifty-year run one panel at a time, four daily or a dozen Sunday panels a day. This is a great era to see that building process going on.