Remember when they rebooted Peanuts and took that jagged line off of Charlie Brown’s shirt?
Two things that struck me while reading the latest Complete Peanuts volume:
1. This book is reprinting from the years 1979-1980, which is also about the same time I was reading just about every Peanuts strip reprint book I could lay my hands on at the time. So, I was reading a whole lot of strips from before 1979, but not a whole lot of contemporary ones which hadn’t yet made it into the reprint books at the time. As a result…nearly this entire book feels “new” to me, since I recognize almost none of the strips. I suppose I may have caught a few in the paper, but I wouldn’t recall those as well as the strips I’ve seen in the various Peanuts collections that I would read over and over again.
Yes, that means I didn’t really read any of the reprint collections from the early 1980s onward. I wouldn’t get back into seeking out Peanuts books ’til the late 1990s, reprinting those last few years of the strip.
2. There’s a sequence of strips in this book where the gang attends what appears to be some kind of religious cult summer camp. I may be reading a bit into this, but clearly something has gone horribly wrong when this kind of injustice is perpetrated upon innocent youth:
Those monsters.
Anyway, Peppermint Patty gets a bit freaked out by one of the guest speakers going on about “the last days” and the end of the world. Not a storyline I really expected in my Peanuts book, but yet another example of Charles Schulz’s continuing topicality…though in this case, the regular arising of doomsayers is nothing new and was bound to cycle through again. SPOILER ALERT: Peppermint Patty gathers evidence and uses skeptical, critical thinking to resolve her particular issue here.
I’m kind of all “new DC”-ed out at the moment, so I’m breaking from the commentary…even though as I write this, we’re only hours away from the official announcement of what the hell’s going on with the Superman family of books. The pics already leaked…via DC putting them in their blog’s image directory and people finding them…so we’ve all already seen them by now, I’m sure. And that pic with Superman’s new costume…that only goes to show George Perez can make anything look great. Anyway, those of you reading this Friday morning or later can hie yourself hither to the DC Comics weblog and check ’em out yourself.
About the titles announced Thursday…I guess we can blame that movie for the more striking and recognizable Jonah Hex title for going away, to be replaced by the Hex-starring and more blandly-titled All-Star Western. And I’m not sure why a new series starring the grandson of Sgt. Rock amuses me, but it does.
BUT I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT NEW DCS AT THE MOMENT so shutting up now.
I was a big fan of Perez during his Titans/Crisis/Wonder Woman days, but looking back it’s astonishing just how ass he was at designing costumes. Jericho? Pariah? Monitor? Harbinger? We can now add Superman to the list.
That Peanuts storyline, surely fine stuff, is just one of several examples of Schulz going after adamant religiosity in his strips. Rich stuff. (I used one of the strips on my blog during the recent apocalypse foofraw – http://aaugh.com/wordpress/?p=1571 )
Isn’t Jim Lee the culprit when it comes to the new designs?
Regarding Perez and costumes: Don’t forget the way-over-expositioned Troia get-up.
The only good thing about those 52 new DCnU titles is the fact that Resurrection Man is getting his own series. Woohoo!