Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron by Charles M. Schulz

I have to assume Charles Schulz would have approved of this book. He didn't rubber-stamp every bit of merchandise and brand extension - he had high standards, and kept a close eye on his licensors - but he liked to do different packages, and he clearly enjoyed putting more well-made Peanuts stuff out into the world.

He might have even had this idea, eventually - though, if he did, I bet he would have done some new work, at least a page or so, for the book.

Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron is a thematic Peanuts collection; this 2015 book collects what I think are all of the strips in which Snoopy appears as "the World War I flying ace." [1] I think the strips are more-or-less in chronological order from page to page, but there are several unexplained sections in the book - I think roughly "longer sequences," "one-off strips," and "Sundays." It's in the same format as the Complete Peanuts series, wider than it is tall, with generally three dailies or one Sunday per page.

And my mind immediately turns to my old publishing-hand track: I wonder "how did they do that?" This was towards the end of the two-plus-decade Complete Peanuts project (see a whole lot of my posts on the series over the years), so my assumption is that the folks at Fantagraphics were seeing that end in sight and brainstorming other ideas for books. Maybe they even had a big database of the strips, since I think they had to scan and clean up all of them as part of the project, and - here's where my flights of fancy take over - maybe they even tagged the strips, so they could run a search like "give me all the Rerun strips" or, if they were insane, "every Charlotte Braun appearance."

I belabor that point because, if I'm right and the Big Brains at Fanta do have a detailed tagging system, we could presumably get a near-infinite number of quirky, specific Peanuts books, from Schroeder Celebrates Beethoven's Birthday to Spike's Greatest Excursions. Sure: most of those would never sell, but that's what ebooks are for!

Anyway, this book is full of the sillier side of Peanuts, featuring a beagle sitting on his doghouse and pretending to dogfight (and lose, always - Peanuts is Peanuts to its core) with the Red Baron and then running around a suburban neighborhood pretending it's either behind enemy lines or wartime Paris. He drinks a lot of root beer, and curses the war. He even flies some commercial airplanes "after the war" to take other cast members various places.

I don't want to anatomize this: it's silly and fun, and silly fun things don't deserve to be dissected. But I'll just mention two things Schulz does that I saw several times and appreciated.

First is a tiny thing: when flying out, Snoopy faces right. When coming back to base, or running away from a flock of Fokkers, he turns and faces left. It's such a comics thing: funny, understated, unremarked.

Second is how Schulz weaves his different bits of business together. These are all Red Baron strips, but that doesn't mean they're only Red Baron strips. The World War I flying ace went on a POW train to a detention camp off with Charlie Brown to summer camp several times. He even shows up on the baseball field a couple of times. Peanuts was a tapestry, with different threads rising and falling in the weave over the years, but it was all of a piece, from the more serious sequences like "Mr. Sack" to the silliest Red Baron strip.

And this is the silliest stuff - there's a lot of fine Schulz wordplay and slapstick. (Snoopy pushes Peppermint Pattie "out of the plane" at least five times, always drawn the same way.) And I love the way he draws the doghouse/plane riddled with bullet holes: it's so good at selling the idea.

If you want to read one Peanuts book, and want it to be a frivolous one, this is a great choice. But I warn you: reading a bit of Peanuts will probably make you want to dive into the whole thing.

[1] Do not confuse it with Snoopy and the Red Baron, a 1966 book reformatting some of the early Red Baron stories into a small-format hardcover, part of the same loose series of Peanuts books as Happiness Is a Warm Puppy and Snoopy and "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night".