Nearing The End: The Complete Peanuts 93-94 and 95-96

When Fantagraphics was given permission to publish The Complete Peanuts, doing so in chronological order, it gave the audience a chance to look at old work with new eyes. There were a number of rewards in the early going since so many of Schulz's earlier strips had never been reprinted, mostly due to the author's request. There were some gags he didn't like and others that he thought might become dated too quickly. Given his astounding seven-days-a-week workload for close to fifty years, it's no surprise that there'd be a few clunkers and even a few repeats thrown in there. What was revelatory about the first ten to fifteen years was the incredibly high hit-to-miss ratio in his strips. Something like eighty to ninety percent were at the very least good, and many of them were great. He'd take an idea and sometimes go on a two ore three week run with it.

The second big surprise was that once the strip moved into the 70s, it maintained an incredibly high level of quality, like between 65-75%. The strip was quite different in some ways, with the addition of characters like Peppermint Patty, Marcie, Woodstock and Spike, but that gave Schulz a chance to reinvent the strip with characters who were far more fully-formed than ciphers like Patty, Shermy, Violet, etc. Familiar characters like Pigpen and Schroeder also faded into the background a bit, because there wasn't much to these characters other than one or two gimmicks. While the tone of the strip became increasingly sentimental and sometimes nonsensical (mostly in the guise of Snoopy), the pathos of Charlie Brown stayed at the same level while the strip was deepened through the struggles of Peppermint Patty, who became the strip's emotional center and its soul in its last 25-years.

The impetus she provided sustained Peanuts through the 1980s. While not at the same overall level of quality, the strip continued to explore Peppermint Patty and her travails. Interestingly, that included her shoddy treatment at the hands of Charlie Brown, something that was never commented on by any of the other characters. Indeed, both Marcie and Peppermint Patty were fairly unabashed in expressing their affection for Charlie Brown, only to have it met with stunned silence, time after time. Charlie Brown may have been a loser in the context of his own peer group, but Marcie and Peppermint Patty were genuine weirdos, and he had no idea how to interact with that particular tribe.

This brings us to Schulz's little-discussed work in the 90s. One can see his line start to tremble as his once-confident minimalism sometimes devolved into figures that looked barely rendered. Other times, the lines, word balloons and even lettering shaky almost to the point of looking like it's vibrating. The volume covering 1993 and 1994 still has plenty of good ideas and great gags. Schulz is at his best when doing stories about baseball. It's Charlie Brown at his purest, as an idealist and optimist who never stops trying, no matter how many times he's failed. The storyline involving Roy Hobbs' (from The Natural) great-granddaughter, picked up now and again over the span of a couple of years, is a particular stand-out. It's an absurd concept that gives the strip a shot in the arm, as Charlie Brown actually wins a couple of baseball games going up against her, only to have her eventually reveal that she let him win because of her affections for him (once again rejected!) was the sort of heartbreak Schulz was so good at in the sixties.

Many of the gags here do feel like Schulz was "flipping channels", so to speak, as every day he'd turn his attention to something he thought was amusing, perhaps searching for a spark for a longer narrative. On any given day, that could be looking in on Spike; the struggles of Peppermint Patty in school along with her foil, Marcie; Snoopy as the World War I flying ace; Charlie Brown's bedtime existentialism, Lucy yelling and Rerun's consistent bafflement regarding the world. Only the baseball strips felt completely "lived in", as though Schulz effortlessly picked up the long-running baseball narrative wherever he left off.

Just when you thought Schulz was drifting, however, he'd uncork some solid continuing narratives. The strips set at camp are always strong, but the series where Snoopy's in the hospital were unusually touching. There was genuine emotion in Charlie Brown's concern for his dog, leavened by the comic relief of Spike, Andy and Olaf (Snoopy's brothers) showing up at Snoopy's bedside. The football strips are surprisingly visceral, as they are inevitably played in the mud and involve lots of hard hits. Seeing the sheer joy on the face of Peppermint Patty (and the ambivalence of everyone else) makes these strips a delight, and it's clear that Schulz enjoyed adding levels of detail almost unheard of in his other strips. The same was true for his series of D-Day strips commemorating its fiftieth anniversary, as Snoopy is depicted going through its hellish conditions with nary a joke to be found.  The most jaw-dropping strip is the Sunday cartoon where Spike details why he came to live in the desert: because he hated the experience of having to try to hunt and kill something. Again, this was a no-punchline strip that's emotionally raw, the kind Schulz would spring on readers after weeks of silly gags.

In the 1995-96 volume, the ratio of hits-to-misses starts to sharply drop. His most efficient joke machine, Sally Brown, starts to crank out the same punchlines again and again. Aside from an attempt to run away from home that's amusing, she falls prey to the same tedium that started to afflict most of his characters as Schulz appeared to be running dry of inspiration. In order to break out of the tedium, Schulz went against his own tendencies a few times. Charlie Brown meets a girl who wants to dance with him and he's elated, until he thinks he made her up somehow. When she proves to be quite real and asks him to a ball, he winds up getting kicked out because Snoopy crashed the party. While that's a more typical ending for a Charlie Brown story, the one where he comes in and mops the floor with a marbles hustler named Joe Agate is an unabashed win for "Cool Thumb" Brown. Perhaps the fact that he was sticking up for someone else (Rerun had his marbles hustled from him) made this work so well.

Snoopy's on the cover of this one as the World Famous Attorney, and he truly dominates the book. Some of his characters are truly awful (the card player named "Joe Blackjack" is perhaps Schulz's least inspired idea), but roping Spike into the increasingly-detailed World War I fantasy (here, Spike's in the infantry and stands in a trench) was actually quite clever and opened up some more storytelling lanes for Schulz. More and more, it became difficult to predict the strip on a daily basis. It frequently got weird as often as it was hacky or sentimental. That included Schulz more frequently altering the structure of the strips, going to one-panel strips with a sort of panorama effect of gags. That was often used for the strips where the gang was waiting for their schoolbus, which generated a new barrage of gags, as well as the weirdly contemplative strips where the characters would discuss Jesus (often asking if he had a dog) or Snoopy would make a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald. In continued stories, the one-panel strips stack quite nicely to create a visual gestalt that Schulz probably never even considered. Some of the low-lights (other than drawing kids with backwards-baseball caps) included a joke about "beak-piercing" and a truly lowest common denominator gag about The Macarena. There are moments of heart and wit, but 1996 was the first time Schulz really seemed to be in a creative rut. Considering that this came forty-six years into doing the same strip, day after day, it's not a bad record. I'll be curious to see if the final two volumes show Schulz shedding some of that sameness by getting weirder.

Sequart Reprints: Peanuts 1967-68 and 1969-70

This article was originally published at seqaurt.com in 2007.
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It's difficult as a critic to tackle Peanuts, because I was devouring these strips as soon as I could read. They're essential to the makeup of my comics-reading DNA and had an important influence on both my worldview and sense of humor. I had the fortune of gaining access to a number of reprints from the 50s and 60s as a young boy and so had an understanding at an early age that the tone and content of the strip shifted over time, since it was quite different than when I started reading the strip on a daily basis in the mid-1970s. Former Comics Journal critic Noah Berlatsky took artists like Chris Ware to task for emphasizing the melancholy nature of Peanuts rather than its wackier or more sentimental elements, but that criticism is shortsighted depending on what era of the strip one is reading. There's no question that the strip at its height (roughly from 1958-1967) is far more brutal and unsparing to its characters and far less sentimental and episodic than it would later become. That's due in part to some shifts in tone and focus on characters.

Snoopy shifts into serious fantasy-character mode here, as he appears on 32 separate pages as the World War I flying ace in the collection. Snoopy also pops up as a secret agent, an Olympic ice-skater and becomes a champion wrist-wrestler, as well as a piranha and a vulture. Schulz also seizes upon current events like measles shots (which Linus is in a panic about) and even touches on the burgeoning counter-culture. That's made explicit with the introduction of the long-haired "hippie-bird" that would later evolve into Woodstock, along with lines from Sally like "I hate your generation!". In addition to various characters protesting various things, Lucy also decides to hold a "crab-in". Schulz, unsolicited, decided to diversify his cast a bit with his first Hispanic character (Jose' Peterson, who never really went anywhere) and Franklin, the now well-known African-American character.

Charlie Brown has settled into dealing with more episodic threats to his existential well-being, with regular abuse at the hands of the kite-eating tree, yearly frustration with Valentine's Day and Lucy taking away the football, and free-floating angst with the little red-haired girl. My favorite strips always revolved around baseball, because this always pointed to Charlie Brown's greatness as a character. Despite the fact that he's a put-upon, wishy-washy nebbish, he always remains a sympathetic character because he's an active protagonist. Despite his unrelenting string of failures in pretty much everything, he never stops trying. Not only that, but with baseball in particular, he never loses his love for his pursuit and his hope that he might one day get better. There's one amazing strip from 3/15/1967 that doesn't actually have a punchline. His team has just lost their first game of the season, and Charlie Brown says, "Losing a ball game is like dropping an ice cream cone on the sidewalk...it just lays there and you know you've dropped it and there's nothing you can do...it's too late..." The last panel just has his head down, exclaiming "Rats!".

Despite everything, Charlie Brown remains a competitor, despite the fact that he's hopelessly outmatched. That deep feeling of rage is what makes him so compelling; if he was nothing but mere melancholy, he'd be insufferable. His anger at the world and his desire to change it despite all evidence to the contrary is why he's one of the greatest characters in the history of comics. There's a great sequence where Peppermint Patty offers Charlie Brown four of her own players for Snoopy and Charlie Brown accepts. He's then horrified at himself for trading away his own dog just for the sake of winning some baseball games and everyone else is even more horrified. It's the first time I can recall in this strip where Charlie Brown does the wrong thing morally and is called out on it, though he does do the right thing in the end.

The other major stars of this volume are Lucy, Linus, Sally and Peppermint Patty. Lucy engages in all of her usual crabby behavior, but her general viciousness is on full display here. She is pure, unstoppable id, frustrated only by Schroeder's total disinterest in her. Linus is both the most thoughtful character in the strip and the most ineffectual in some ways. He's more afraid of things than usual in this book: shots, being shunned by his teacher, vultures, piranha, etc. He's also the most intellectually adventurous character in the strip even though he struggles with his schoolwork. Sally is constantly confused and angry at her world, which offers a nice contrast with Lucy who demands that the world conform to her own understanding of it. Sally is baffled by everything and demands that everyone explain it to her, usually with hilarious results.

Peppermint Patty represents the biggest shift in tone for the strip. She's the first major new character in the strip to get whole weeks devoted to her and usually completely outside the purview of the regular Peanuts' gang neighborhood. It's almost like she's a character from an entirely different strip that just happens to regularly cross over with Peanuts. She's a misfit in her own way, but she's sort of Charlie Brown's mirror image: she's confident, feels loved and is never afraid to offer up her opinion. While she's a bit rough around the edges, she lacks Lucy's cruelty and Violet's cattiness. The sequence where she's the tent monitor for a group of younger girls was hilarious, and one could almost sense Schulz' excitement in doing a very different kind of story in his long-running strip, eighteen years into its production.

That's the stunning thing about this book. In over 700 strips, there are a number of long laughs to be had and very few clunkers. Schulz was always reluctant to reproduce his entire body of work (which led to the reprints and reprints of reprints with so many repeated strips) because of strips that he either thought were weak or didn't age well. In the context of a career overview such as this, I'm grateful that every strip is being reprinted, in chronological order. Seeing his line develop over time, seeing him come up with new ideas and character and which ones stuck and which ones didn't is fascinating to observe. There's also a certain delightful weight of history that builds as one goes from volume to volume. One wonders how much the intense, world-renowned fame of his strip affected him as an artist at this point. Did he feel the urge to bring back popular tropes based on reader feedback and demand, or did he ignore such concerns and simply draw what he wanted? It seems like with this volume he tried to do a little of both, keeping old fans happy while always trying to keep himself interested with new challenges.

In terms of the visuals, Schulz is years into his mature style. He's exactly what I mean when I talk about an artist needing to find the ideal style with which to express themselves with clarity. For Schulz, though his line is spare, it's full of life and liveliness. He's not afraid to stylize his drawings when need be, especially in the pursuit of action. His strip has a surprising energy and flow to it when he chooses to pursue that sort of story (usually involving Snoopy), creating an almost visceral crunch in these scenes. He's also a master of gesture, expression and the quiet moment. He leavens the frequently violent confrontations in his strip with heartfelt emotion, and is equally skilled at making his audience feel both.

This series of reprints is one of the most important in the history of comics, for so many reasons. It keeps alive the legacy of the comics artist who may have been the most important cartoonist of the latter half of the 20th century. It puts the now-ubiquitous Peanuts iconography back on comic book pages instead of simply being known through advertising and merchandising. And of course, the fact that Jeannie Schulz and the Schulz estate licensed this to Fantagraphics not only started off a new golden age of classic strip reprints, it's also funded numerous worthy publications from FBI. While those concerns are impressive, the mere fact that Fantagraphics has committed itself to this project, and that it's done so well (special kudos to Seth for design and John Waters for his very astute and engaged introduction) is a gift to fans of the art.

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This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2008.

In The Complete Peanuts 1969-70, it's interesting to see popular culture influence Schulz in a more direct way than before. He makes cracks about feminism and has Sally utter "I hate your generation!" to an older kid. Schulz is very much still at the height of his powers but was also looking for new ways to entertain himself while processing the world around him. The most prominent character in this volume is clearly Snoopy. Schulz assigned him a bird as a sidekick and pointedly named him Woodstock, devoting an entire strip to this revelation. It was an odd gag, as though making a reference to hippies was funny in and of itself. Most every long storyline in these years involved Snoopy: being sent before the Head Beagle (thanks to Frieda turning him in for not chasing rabbits), becoming the Head Beagle and then quitting, trying to help Woodstock fly south for the winter and getting lost, trying to find his mother, being asked to make a speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm and getting caught up in an anti-war riot. The Head Beagle stuff is the strip at its weirdest, coming up with a sort of an overriding mythology that seeks to somehow connect Snoopy's behavior as a dog and his status as a sort of person. When it's revealed that Snoopy owns a piece of land that the city wants and he's unwilling to sell, he's resistant because he's not allowed to vote or run around without a leash.

That weird tension between animal and character is at play through this volume; Snoopy does things like go to the vet, goes to a kennel and is forced to stay with Lucy when Charlie Brown goes on vacation. He also spends a lot of time as the World War I flying ace, as a hockey pro (often against Woodstock), a novelist (the legendary "It was a dark and stormy night..." strips), astronaut and most oddly, a "world-famous grocery clerk". That particular set of strips almost seemed like a strange parody of the other Snoopy fantasy roles, with Snoopy even noting that there weren't more than a dozen famous grocery clerks. It's as though Schulz was fascinated by his local grocery clerk bellowing out questions at his market and had to channel this into his strip.

Peppermint Patty continued to draw a lot of focus in this volume, and much of it had a bittersweet quality. She was still confident and brash, but Schulz instilled her with all sorts of insecurities. Peppermint Patty despaired over not being beautiful, over not being able to wear sandals at school, and in general over her lack of femininity. Charlie Brown had no idea what to make of her or what to say to her, especially when she ran roughshod over him in conversations. At the same time, he was clearly pleased by her lack of pettiness and guile. About the only time Charlie Brown felt good in this volume was when he loaned a glove to a teammate of Peppermint Patty's and he wouldn't give it back. He felt good because the kid he took it resented Charlie Brown for "thinking he was better than him"--and this notion positively delighted him. Perhaps the sweetest segment in the book came when Peppermint Patty asked Snoopy (whom she didn't quite realize was a dog) to a dance as her date, and she punched out someone who made fun of him (and as Snoopy noted, he bit the chaperone on the leg). Schulz usually created his humor by constantly thwarting his characters' desires, but it seemed as though he didn't quite have the heart to do that to Peppermint Patty. She really seemed to be living in a different world than the other regular characters in the strip.

Speaking of the other regulars, they don't shine quite as brightly in this volume. Lucy, the unquestioned star and irritant of the book for many years, is reduced to more of a side character with few extended storylines. Schulz really tabled his more obscure characters like 5, Shermy, Frieda, Patty, Violet and Pigpen, especially with more vibrant characters like Peppermint Patty to explore. That said, characters like Linus and Sally get some great segments. Sally's blustery frustration with the entire world (and school in particular) draws some of the biggest laughs, especially when she yells at her brother for not knowing answers to ridiculous questions. Linus gets mixed up with Miss Othmar's teacher's strike and starts becoming increasingly cynical.
Schulz noted that every one of his characters represented an aspect of himself. Lucy was his angry id, Snoopy was his adventurous daydreamer, Charlie Brown was his neuroses and fears, and Linus was his thinker. In this volume, Linus seemed to be processing Schulz' own feelings about becoming the world's most famous cartoonist and a multimedia star. It's clear that he was somewhat bewildered by the attention and started to question his own process. There's a strip where Linus writes a fawning essay about being so happy to be back in school. When he teacher praises it, Linus turns to Charlie Brown and says, "As the years go by, you learn what sells!" That's certainly true of this strip, as Peanuts' more whimsical aspects were obviously much easier to market than Charlie Brown's persistent melancholia. Later, when giving a teacher another fawning answer and Charlie Brown calls him out on it, Linus shrugs and says "Is it so wrong to make a teacher happy?" He might as well have said "audience".

In the face of Peanuts getting more and more episodic and losing some of its bite, Schulz responded with some of his most gut-wrenching moments for Charlie Brown. The sequence where the little red-headed girl moves away, with Charlie Brown standing there without even introducing himself, is heartbreaking. All the more so as Linus is screaming at him to move and do something, and becoming furious when Charlie Brown does nothing. When Charlie Brown starts to fantasize about seeing her in the future, Linus kicks him in the ass because he knows it'll never happen and he's tired of entertaining his friend's self-delusions. Those strips are remarkably bitter, and one can sense Schulz shift away from them with some bit of Snoopy silliness as a sort of antidote.

Nothing much goes right for Charlie Brown here: his baseball team is awful, he's terrible in school and even his baseball hero, Joe Shlabotnik, fails to show up at a sports banquet because he forgot the date and city. Lucy still abuses him hilariously, especially when she tells him horrible things that will happen to him in the future that he "may as well know now". Lucy is still frustrated by Schroeder, though their interactions lead to some of the liveliest strips in the book. In particular, Schulz gets into an unusually meta gag involving "spray-on Beethoven" that is much more formally playful than one would expect from him.

I suppose the best way to describe Schulz in this book is "restless". He'd gone through many years of spilling bile on the page and was looking to go in different directions. He was being pulled by contemporary influences, the potential of new characters, the commercial considerations of his work and the genuine affection he held for his older characters. He had completed the transition as master gagsmith to someone who created amusing situations and took his characters to some strange places. No individual strip past this era would pack as much punch as his earlier work, yet their cumulative effect still revealed a master cartoonist with an impeccable sense of timing and design. Again, the chronological arrangement of the strips, allowing the audience to see the passage of time and its effect on his creative choices, becomes a crucial element in fully understanding and enjoying them. The cumulative impact of these volumes is greater than any individual strip, and that's a testament to Schulz' devotion to his craft.

Where I Came In: Peanuts 73-74

Rob reviews the latest volume in the career-spanning collection of Charles Schulz's classic strip, THE COMPLETE PEANUTS 1973-74.


The latest volume of THE COMPLETE PEANUTS held a special meaning for me, since these are the first comics I started reading as a four-year-old child. As far as I can remember, PEANUTS may well have been the first thing I started reading, period. These weren't necessarily my favorite strips from Charles Schulz (even as a child, I recognized the greatness of the late 50s and early 60s), but there's a reassuring sturdiness to them. At the same time, Schulz was trying any number of new ideas to see what would stick. As a result, the day-to-day tone of the strip often widely varied, from one-liners to familiar psychological explorations to continuity stories to long riffs on sports to social commentary. To his credit, Schulz wasn't afraid to abruptly drop an idea when it stopped working, or more likely, when he lost interest in it.


A case in point was the end of the Poochie saga that started in the previous volume. Here, Schulz took an unusually melodramatic turn by ret-conning Snoopy's original owner into the strip, a girl named Poochie. When we finally meet her, Schulz either decided it wasn't working out as he expected or had deliberately framed it as a shaggy dog story, but in any event the sequence ended with a befuddled Poochie encountering Joe Cool and walking away. Schulz also briefly took on gender discrimination head-on in the form of Marcie (a character who got a great deal of attention in this volume) dealing with the sexism of Thibault, a boy who didn't want her on the baseball team. To say that Schulz's take on this issue was heavy-handed is an understatement, even drawing Thibault with a permanent scowl that all but paints him as a villain. Schulz concludes the sequence with Marcie punching him in the face and doesn't pursue the issue this directly any further.


Schulz always noted that his first mission as a cartoonist was to be funny. While his most memorable strips may have been ones that traded in melancholy, a number of his daily strips were devoted to one-off gags. In this volume, Schulz went from setting up those gags in the form of his characters to having Snoopy literally type wordplay jokes for the reader. A number of these gags were obvious groaners, but Schulz anticipated the audience's reaction with the real gag of each strip: the "audience" of his typewritten story committing an act of violence on the punster. "She creamed him with the electric toaster" was a particular favorite of mine. Speaking of Snoopy, while he's as much a mainstay as ever, he doesn't quite dominate the action as much in this volume as in past years, at least in terms of lengthy fantasy digressions. We get the occasional appearance of Joe Cool and the WWI fighting ace, but more in one-offs as opposed to days-long sagas.


In terms of the longer sequences, Schulz concentrated on Charlie Brown and his relationship with sports and summer camp. When Charlie Brown finally cracks up and sees a baseball rise in the east instead of the sun, he even develops a rash on the back of his head in the shape of a baseball. Forced to go to summer camp wearing a paper sack over his head, he suddenly becomes beloved and respected by his peers (despite the nickname of "Mister Sack"), even becoming camp president. Once again, Schulz ends this sequence with a bizarre blackout of a joke, featuring the first and only appearance of MAD's Alfred E Neuman. Schulz had gone from a fairly grounded sense of consensus reality to Snoopy's flights of fancy to outright weirdness. That became quite evident when he introduced the character of the sentient schoolhouse that Sally started to talk to, one that dropped bricks on people it didn't like. Like every other fantastical element in this strip, Schulz introduced it matter-of-factly and without explanation. Schulz really took to this idea, turning to it frequently late in 1974.

Those weird digressions apart, Schulz really did play out his ideas on the baseball diamond during this era. He throws Rerun Van Pelt on the baseball team, has Snoopy pursue Babe Ruth's home run record at the same time Hank Aaron was going after it (adding a bit more social commentary), and having an actual win overturned because of a gambling scandal. (Shades of Pete Rose--Rerun bet on Charlie Brown's team, even as he was a player!) Schulz also did a series of somewhat hacky gags featuring Snoopy as a tennis player; it was clear that Schulz had suddenly become enamored of the sport and wrung every bit of humor he could muster from Snoopy playing an unseen opponent. This is the first time for me as a reader where an extended series of Shulz gags felt creaky to me now, but 24 years into his tenure, it wasn't surprising to see him eager to try something new to him.

That seems to be the essence of Sparky Schulz to me: even with the pressure of the daily grind and his position as the lynchpin of what had become a vast empire, Schulz wrote to amuse himself. He never hacked out a drawing and freely experimented with new directions, characters and points of view. By 1974, the strip moved away from the dominant quartet of Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy and saw Marcie and Peppermint Patty as crucial catalysts. Unlike the more generic Peanuts characters like Shermy, Patty and Violet, Schulz went out of his way to give his new characters distinctive & quirky personalities and backstories. They weren't one-joke characters like Pig-Pen or Frieda, but true extensions of Schulz's personality like his immortal earlier creations. While Schulz repeated motifs and extensively sampled certain gags over the years, he refused to completely freeze his characters in time. Indeed, he changed his focus from the philosophical and psychological aspects of the characters and their relationships to an approach that was simultaneously broader but more in tune with contemporary issues. By 1974, he had come up with so many ideas that it was easier and easier to take a pit stop at older ideas with a fresh narrative--and in so doing, throwing older readers a bone--and quickly moved on from them into a new idea. At his best in this volume, Schulz gave the readers some of the best stories of his career. The chronological presentation of the material is so important in building a true rhythm with the reader, and I'll be curious to see how his oft-maligned 1980s strips feel when read in a collection. In the meantime, seeing how the strip's tone furthed descends into absurdity in the late 70s will also be interesting to observe, especially if Schulz's heart doesn't seem to be in the non-absurd stories.

Tapping the Well: Complete Peanuts 71-72

Rob reviews the latest volume of Charles Schulz's THE COMPLETE PEANUTS: 1971-72 (Fantagraphics).


The latest volume of THE COMPLETE PEANUTS finds Charles Schulz still at his peak, having completed the transition of the strip from its 60s heyday. While Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy were all still major characters and each had their own story arcs, they no longer dominated the strip the way they did in the 60s. What differentiates this volume from 1969-70 is that Snoopy as a fantasy figure also recedes a bit more into the background as well. This volume sees Schulz begin to really explore the possibilities inherent in Peppermint Patty, gives her a foil in Marcie, introduces the last outsider character in the strip in Rerun and gives Sally Brown a star turn.

Over twenty years into the strip, Schulz remarkably recycled very few of his jokes (there's one about Lucy and bugs that seems a bit familiar) and instead seemed to try to find new ways to amuse himself. The result was that his strip felt like several different overlapping strips in one, depending on the day. When he wanted to go with laugh-out-loud gags, Sally was his new go-to character. Her combination of naivete, obliviousness and blind rage made her perfect as a mouthpiece of malapropisms. While Lucy's rage was always a constant of the strip, Sally's anger was more unfocused and harmless, even if she was earnest in presenting her views. Strips where she panicked about missing Easter vacation in January, vowing that her teachers would "never get me to tell all I know" about oceans and misunderstanding that this wasn't a threat, writes a theme about the 4th of July because she's "a victim of programming", calls a dinosaur a "bronchitis" and erroneously comes up with a backstory for "forest strangers" point out her earnest cluelessness. Her real star turn came in a strip where she was forced to go on a field trip to an art museum, and warns a fellow student to "try not to have a good time...this is supposed to be educational". Schulz even went so far as to vary his visual approach just a bit with her, bugging out her eyes in one strip or making thicker black dots to indicate her being stunned.


Schulz was not satisfied to just crank out gags like this. He spent much of the volume exploring one-on-one relationships between many of the characters: Snoopy/Woodstock, Charlie Brown/Lucy (a perennial favorite), Charlie Brown/Peppermint Patty, and Patty/Marcie. Schulz dropped a surprising number of pop culture references in other strips, though never seemed comfortable enough to spend much time with them other than as one-offs. The strip where Linus is depressed because Bob Dylan was about to turn thirty was especially strange. There are also some extended fantasy sequences with Snoopy, unveiling his "Joe Cool" persona, but this doesn't dominate the strip during this period as much as the prior volume.


Peppermint Patty still felt like a character crossing over from a completely different strip whenever she appeared, but Schulz had managed to find ways to wrap her life up into virtually every other character in the strip. She still talked and dressed differently than everyone else (sounding way more modern than the others), but while she was every bit as aggressive as Lucy, she lacked her relentless narcissism. The extended stories with her and the clueless Charlie Brown make up the heartbreaking center of this book. She made up her mind that he had a crush on her (a clear displacement of her own feelings), while C.B. was still so hung up on the little red-haired girl that he couldn't figure out what was going on with Peppermint Patty. This played out when the two of them went to a carnival together and he inadvertently hurts her feelings, when Patty brutally dismisses him to Marcie when she wasn't aware that he was listening, and during one of the brilliant summer camp sequences when Peppermint Patty meets the little red-haired girl and realizes that she can't compete. Unlike the obnoxious Lucy, we really feel for Peppermint Patty when she suffers, because she really puts herself out there more than any other character.

Introducing Marcie as her Linus-figure was a stroke of genius and a cementing of Peppermint Patty's status as one of the major characters in the strip. Marcie acted as friend, adviser, catalyst and tormentor (always calling her "sir" certainly touched on P.P.'s issues with her own femininity, later played out in a memorable run of strips where she challenges the school dress code). It was interesting that Schulz was able to introduce such vivid characters about halfway through his run on the strip, characters whose quirks made them very different from the bland Shermy, Violet and Patty. At the same time, Marcie and Peppermint Patty weren't one-note jokes like Frieda or 5. One wonders how much potential he saw in these characters from the very beginning, or if his process of integrating them into the strip was more serendipitous.

Snoopy's antics seemed a bit tame here compared to prior volumes. Joe Cool was Schulz' interpretation of the modern college student and was more mildly amusing than really funny. There's lots of interplay between Snoopy and Woodstock (who is now Snoopy's secretary, bringing up a whole new world of jokes), including a couple of walkabouts. There's a bizarre sequence where Snoopy has to go off and aid a beagle named Thompson, who meets his end at the hands of a pack of rabbits. The funniest Snoopy bits involve his fascination with the "Six Bunny-Wunnies" books and their author, Helen Sweetstory. Snoopy becomes obsessed with the author, is crushed when he finds out she's a cat lover, travels to find her home and later writes an unauthorized biography of her. Schulz tosses in a few sly pop-culture references here in the titles of their books, like "The Six Bunny-Wunnies Join An Encounter Group" and "The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out", the latter book getting banned by Charlie Brown's school.

There are still plenty of familiar strips featuring the old reliable characters. Linus' arc featuring him trying (and briefly succeeding) to give up his blanket addiction through Snoopy is a particular highlight. Lucy managing to get a promised kiss out of Schroeder if she hits a home run, only to turn it down when she does as a victory for women's lib, was both hilarious and topical. Lucy and Charlie Brown have plenty of great "psychiatric help" gags (though the booth increased in price to 7 cents in some strips). Charlie Brown's adventures at camp were now dependable yearly highlights, with Schulz understanding that repetition is the key through humor with Charlie Brown's tentmate saying nothing but "Shut up, and leave me alone!" The balance Schulz struck in this volume is as perfect as it would get: a perfect blend of fantasy, whimsy, jokes, heartbreak, topical references and sturdy characterization.