Peanuts: A Golden Celebration : The Art and the Story of the World's Best-Loved Comic Strip

Rating:
Summary: Good Grief: A Golden Celebration for a Gem of An Artist!!
Review: When Peanuts made it's debut as a new comic strip in 1950, the world of the funny pages was changed forever. Charles Schultz was argueably the greatest and most certainly the most influential strip artist of all time, and Peanuts totally changed the perception of the medium, appealing to the entire family rather than mostly to adults, and broadening and deepening the intellectual plane on which the art takes form. Schultz, who writes most of the copy in this book himself and includes a short bio and some wonderful running commentary throughout, inadvertantly proves how revolutionary Peanuts was by including some of the strips which influenced him while growing up. These comics, from Krazy Kat to Wash Tubbs, are mildly amusing at best, woefully inferior at worst, and in virtually all cases have failed to stand the test of time. Peanuts, however, has never dated, and most of the strips still are very readable half a century after original publication. An excellent collection, to be sure, and one which belongs on any comic fan's shelf. So why only four stars? Because this collection celebrates Schultz's entire career (at the time), from 1950 to 1999, when in fact, his very best and most innovative work was produced during a comparatively narrow time frame, from about 1954 or so to 1966. Luckily, some of the most famous series of strips are represented here, from Snoopy's famous impressions of other characters (including a particularly hilarious Beethoven) to Charlie Brown's longing for the Little Red Haired Girl (any person who has ever been in love can relate to that one.) In 1966, however, Charles Schultz produced his most famous series of cartoons dealing with Snoopy and The Red Baron, a Walter Mitty-esque idea so brilliant, that neither he nor any other cartoonist has been able to top it since. From that point, Peanuts began declining in quality from sheer brilliance down to mere excellence; Snoopy in particular was never the same wonderful dog we had all grown to know and love. (Remember the endless series of strips from about fifteen years ago that centered on Snoopy's love of cookies? It seemed as if he could think of nothing else for two years or more!) The only character who seemed to grow and mature in these later years was Charlie Brown himself; it was nice to see him have successful encounters with girls, become a summer-camp hero (albeit with a paper bag over his head!) and actually WIN A BALL GAME!!! Luckily for us, Schultz still continued to draw the strip so well that it is still one of the most popular comics in the country several years after his death. In short, a very good collection, one that will hopefully lead the reader to search out and find individual collections of the glory years of Peanuts when Schultz was truly at his best. Good Grief, indeed!!!

Rating:
Summary: Oh Good Grief! Fifty years of Peanuts!
Review: I can't believe it's been that long. Although I'm nowhere near 50 years of age, I enjoy the Peanuts comic strip and I've read it for as long as I can remember. This is a wonderful book to read to kids or to yourself. It's a great compilation of Charles Schulz's creative genius. It may be...but it's worth the cost.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but bad Editing
Review: Peanuts is a great strip, and this is a great collection. The fact that one or two strips appear twice is more than made up for in Shulz's auto-biography, and looking into the history of a true piece of American literature is more fun than I've had in a while. Here we learn about Shulz's hardships in getting started, and about the critics that followed hims afterward (who would've thought you could read so much into Lucy pulling the football away?) Shulz gives details of his inspiration and his style. Definitely a top-rate piece of work.