In case you missed it, I had a couple posts about the Free Comic Book Day event at our store here and here.
The Complete Peanuts volume 3 brings us up through 1956, and the characters are slowly changing into their more familiar forms. Linus is still more toddler than philosopher, Snoopy is still more dog than…well, the anthropomorph he would later become, but Charlie Brown is firmly established as the loser/center of the strip.
What was interesting was seeing some of the strips that haven’t been seen since they originally ran in the newspapers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the one that references Elvis Presley by name before, and while I remember seeing a number of the Davy Crockett coonskin cap strips, the eventual payoff strip to that particular sequence (“Whatever happened to Davy Crockett?”) was new to me.
Another notable aspect of this project was the varying quality of reproduction of some of the strips. This isn’t a criticism…it’s just a physical reminder of the difficulties of attempting to assemble a collection like this. Given said difficulties, it’s amazing that as many of the strips are as clear as they are.
Something pal Dorian and I have been discussing is the eventual health of this series. Everybody wants the early, hard-to-find Peanuts strips, but we wonder what’s going to happen once the series reaches some of the rough patches…like the highly-reprinted, not-so-good 1980s strips. Obsessive collectors like me will pick ’em up anyway…even lesser Schulz is better than some cartoonists on their best days…but I’m afraid sales will dip at that point. Not just because of the strips, but from “weariness” from buying $30 hardcovers twice a year for over a decade.
Well, I made it through the Carl Barks Library series from Gladstone, I can make it though The Complete Peanuts!
Another strip I’d like to see released in complete collections is B.C. by Johnny Hart. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’d like to at least have the first decade’s worth, back when it was, you know, funny.
Then again, the last few years’ worth would be interesting to see, just for the “car wreck” aspect of it all.
A number of years ago, some friends of mine formed a band called “Phooey,” which was quite popular in our area. They were sort of a geek-rock, proto-Weezer type group, which actually doesn’t do them enough credit. I only bring it up because I keep coming across panels in comic books and comic strips that use the word “phooey” that I can’t help but think “wow, that would have been good to use on a band flyer.” Even now, ten years after the band broke up, I still think that every time I see a particularly appropriate usage. That Peanuts panel on the right, from the latest Complete Peanuts volume, seemed like a good one.
By the way, the index in The Complete Peanuts does list all occurrences of the word “phooey” (and its variant, “fooey”). Now that’s an index!
My favorite “Phooey” panel for its flyer-usage potential was from an issue of Casper the Friendly Ghost (or perhaps even The Friendly Ghost Casper), where a character was exclaiming “Phooey! It’s no fun to play with girls!” That would have been nice on a flyer for when Phooey was sharing the stage with an all-girl band that one time….
Spotted via the one essential online comics news source, The Comics Reporter…a new DC logo? The heck? What was wrong with the old one? Okay, I guess we’ve had the DC Bullet for a while, and maybe we were due for a change…but all I can think when I look at this new logo is “boy, that’s going to have to be replaced in a few years.”
Not that the logo is all that bad, really. It seems to work okay on the Return of Donna Troy mock-up (in another link stolen from The Comics Reporter). But I’m not really sure I want to see it on every DC book.
