Sally and Linus: The Full Story, now coming out!

books:


	• The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960 Charles M. Schulz Fantagraphics Books, 2006 - 346 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I love it!

Great things happen in this book. Many firsts like Sally and the Great Pumpkin and many more cool stuff in this great book. Sally also falls in love with Linus and Linus falls in love with his teacher. Some of these comics are ones they used in You're a Good Man Charlie Brown. Good bye 1950s hello 1960s.

The best comic strip ever written

The best ever written. It's very difficult not to relate to Charlie Brown. He is Joe Everyman. I can't wait for the rest of the strips to come out. A big mistake for a "Peanuts" fan not to own them.

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The Secret to Happiness

What is happiness? On April 25, 1960, Charles Schulz, through his character Lucy told us: Happiness is a warm puppy. This immortal sentence is just one of the things that appears in the fifth volume of The Complete Peanuts, which comprises the years 1959 and 1960. As in previous volumes, we see once again why Peanuts is considered by many to be the best comic strip ever.

In some sense, things have not changed from past volumes: Linus still has his blanket, Charlie Brown still can't fly a kite and Lucy is a champion fussbudget. On the other hand, things do move forward, albeit slowly. As original character Shermy (the first to ever speak in a Peanuts strip) becomes less significant, we get a new character with Charlie Brown's sister, Sally. Before she can even talk, she will have her heart broken by Linus, but don't worry, she'll recover fast.

Resiliency is the key to many of these characters, none more so than the strip's centerpiece, Charlie Brown. Constantly luckless and often ridiculed by his "friends" (only Linus, and occasionally Schroeder, are relatively consistent in being nice to him), Charlie Brown, despite his glumness is actually the eternal optimist. He never gives up on flying his kit or playing baseball or even his belief that one day, Lucy will actually allow him to kick that football.

Behind the deceptively simple drawing and the child characters (by this point in the strip, even the adult voices are gone), lies an often deep and sophisticated art, filled with wit and humanity. And like any piece of art that is great and immortal, it is timeless and as good now as ever, whether you're an adult or a child.

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The Great Pumpkin, The Mad Punter, et. al.

The fifth volume of "The Complete Peanuts" covers the years 1959 and 1960. During this period, the four main characters are Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, and Snoopy. Schroeder, Violet, and Patti all have fewer appearances in the strip. Although, Schroeder has a clearly defined role which makes his character stand out more than the other two. Similarly, Pig Pen has a specific role while Shermy is a throw in character, despite the fact that both appear rarely. During this period, we have the first new character since the short-lived Charlotte Braun almost five years previously. Sally Brown is born on May 26th of 1959, we find out her name on June 2nd, and she makes her first appearance in the strip on August 23rd. We see her walking for the first time on August 22nd of the following year.

There are some classic firsts which appear in this book. One is the first strip to have Lucy's Psychiatrist stand, in which she offers the classic advice "Snap out of it!" to Charlie Brown, followed by "Five cents please." The Great Pumpkin is also mentioned for the first time in these strips. There are also some wonderful sequences here, including the impending destruction of Snoopy's doghouse to make way for a freeway bypass, Linus' crush on his teacher, Charlie Brown missing a baseball game to push Sally in her stroller, and many more.

As with the previous volumes in this series, the index is an amazing resource. If you want to look up the strips in which "The Mad Punter" appears, all you have to do is check the index. The Foreword in this edition was written by Whoppi Goldberg and she reflects on her interview of Charles M. Schultz, as well s the role "Peanuts" played in her own life. "Peanuts" was my favorite comic strip when I was young, and it is wonderful to read all these classic strips again. There are also many strips here which were never printed before, so it is a great pleasure to experience them for the first time.

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Sally and Linus: The Full Story, now coming out!

This issue gives us the first shots of Sally, plus some other developments. The baseball themes are being fleshed out (complete with mass-quitting of CB's team) and the Psychologist's Stand makes its debut.

What's most interesting is watching the beginning of Sally's crush on Linus. While the reprinted strips of before show Sally falling in love and Linus responding with revulsion, the new strips reveal some interesting tacks.

First, early on in the book (in a strip that hadn't seen the light of day in the reprints I had read over the years), Linus actually expresses an interest in Sally, wondering if she would be dateable at 17 (when he would be 22). One gets the idea that Schultz actually wanted to develop a situation where Linus was in love but his object was unrequited.

Later on in the book, Schultz hits gold: Sally falls, Linus is embarassed. While some of these strips are familiar, the section where Sally's heart breaks is new to my eyes. Towards the end of this book is a comic strip that is worth every penny: Sally sees Linus walk by and responds in a way that everyone has responded to a broken heart. Only Schultz could have reduced it to half a day's strip!

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

The New York Times bestselling series concludes the first decade of Peanuts!

As the first decade of Peanuts closes, it seems only fitting to bid farewell to that halcyon decade with a cover starring Patty, one of the original three Peanuts.

Major new additions to classic Peanuts lore come fast and furious here. Snoopy begins to take up residence atop his doghouse, and his repertoire of impressions increases exponentially. Lucy sets up her booth and offers her first five-cent psychiatric counsel. (Her advice to a forlorn Charlie Brown: "Get over it.") For the very first time, Linus spends all night in the pumpkin patch on his lonely vigil for the Great Pumpkin (although he laments that he was a victim of "false doctrine," he's back 12 months later). Linus also gets into repeated, and visually explosive, scuffles with a blanket-stealing Snoopy, suffers the first depredations of his blanket-hating grandmother, and falls in love with his new teacher Miss Othmar.

Even more importantly, several years after the last addition to the cast ("Pig-Pen"), Charlie Brown's sister Sally makes her appearance?first as an (off-panel) brand new baby for Charlie to gush over, then as a toddler and eventually a real, talking, thinking cast member. (By the end of this volume, she'll already start developing her crush on Linus.)

All this, and one of the most famous Peanuts strips ever: "Happiness is a warm puppy."

Almost one hundred of the 731 strips collected in this volume (including many Sundays) have never been collected in any book since their original release, with one hundred more having been collected only once in relatively obscure and now impossible-to-find books; in other words, close to one quarter of the strips have never been seen by anyone but the most avid Peanuts completists.

The introduction is by comedienne extraordinaire Whoopi Goldberg, who reveals which Peanuts character she has tattooed on her body (and where)?as well as telling of her meeting with "Sparky" Schulz, and her fascinating theory on Snoopy's brother Spike. The Complete Peanuts continues to receive national and international media attention for its sophisticated treatment of one of the 20th Century's defining American classics.

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