There goes the shutout: Cartoons from More Peanuts and Good grief, more Peanuts! (Peanuts parade ; 13)

Rating:
Summary: Fun with the early Peanuts gang
Review: There Goes the Shutout is from the Classics Peanuts collection by Henry Holt & Co., and contains strips from the early 1950s. Snoopy had big ears and a pointy nose. Lucy is younger (we see her in her crib, and manipulating her parents) and is actually nice to Charlie Brown, although she beats him at checkers. Linus is too young to speak, but he goes "KLUNK" a lot. Violet has pigtails, although there is another character who looks like the Violet we know. It's fun to see the characters looking so young and playing so many games. I own 2 copies of this book, because the first one I got had about 1/4 of the pages from "The Cheshire Beagle" at the beginning (I did not buy it from amazon.com).

Rating:
Summary: Introducing Lucy and Linus Van Pelt to the Peanuts universe
Review: This second collection of Peanuts strips, originally entitled "More Peanuts," features cartoons from 1952-1954. From a historical perspective these strips are particularly fascinating because they complete the first significant transformation in Peanuts. When the strip began Charlie Brown's main protagonists were Patty and Shermy. However, over the course of the first couple of years Snoopy started to emerge more and more, although he was still essentially a "real" dog, and the addition of baby Schroeder, who Charlie Brown introduces to a toy piano. This becomes crucial because it is with Schroeder that Schulz's sense of whimsy first starts to come through.

In "There Goes the Shutout" the Peanuts universe has its two most important additions, the Van Pelt siblings, Lucy and Linus. Lucy shows up with the announcement she has been expelled from nursery school, and we immediately know that somebody with a much harder edge has come into Charlie Brown's life. She is, after all, a fuss-budget, and her presence pushes Charlie Brown more in the direction of being the world's greatest loveable loser. At this point Linus replaces Schroeder as the baby of the bunch, which means at this point he has little to say. Ultimately, it is Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy and Linus who define the directions in which Peanuts could go.

In these strips Schulz also builds on the running gags he first established with Schroeder's piano. That continues as well, with references to the tenth measure of Sinding's Op. 32, No. 3, but we also have the Peanuts gang out on the baseball diamond for the first time (the team is actually ahead 83 to 79 and Charlie Brown suggests since it is Schroeder's ball he should take it and run for home). Still, it is the expansion of the roster of characters, giving Schulz better defined choices for any given gag (do you use Shermy or Shroeder? Lucy or Violet?), that allows him to further refine his humor. This is only the second collection of Peanuts strips, containing work done before most of us were born, but at this point we can clearly recognize the strip we all grew up reading every morning.