The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 [Hardcover]

Charles M. Schulz (Author), Matt Groening (Introduction), Gary Groth (Foreword), Seth (Designer), Matt Groening (Author), Gary Groth (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Complete Peanuts | Publication Date: May 16, 2005

Over half of the strips in this volume have never been printed since they ran in newspapers decades ago! Even the most dedicated Peanuts fan is sure to find many new treasures. Introduction by Matt Groening.

The third volume in our acclaimed series takes us into the mid-1950s as Linus learns to talk, Snoopy begins to explore his eccentricities (including his hilarious first series of impressions), Lucy's unrequited crush on Schroeder takes final shape, and Charlie Brown becomes...well, even more Charlie Brown-ish! Over half of the strips in this volume have never been printed since their original appearance in newspapers a half-century ago! Even the most dedicated Peanuts collector/fan is sure to find many new treasures. The Complete Peanuts will run 25 volumes, collecting two years chronologically at a rate of two a year for twelve years. Each volume is designed by the award-winning cartoonist Seth (It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken) and features impeccable production values; every single strip from Charles M. Schulz's 50-year American classic is reproduced better than ever before. This volume includes an introduction by Matt Groening (The Simpsons) as well as the popular Complete Peanuts index, a hit with librarians and collectors alike, and an epilogue by series editor Gary Groth. 2005 Eisner Award winner, Best Archival Collection/Project. 730 black-and-white comic strips

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1955-56, the Peanuts gang may have still been in first grade (or lower), but the characters continue to grow into their distinctive and unmistakable personalities. Snoopy overcomes some embarrassment to reveal his talent for impressions (wolf, rhino, alligator, kangaroo, Violet, etc.) and his joyous dance-the-day-away attitude. Linus adopts the same attitude ("Five hundred years from now, who'll know the difference?") and continues to show his genius in such diverse activities as square balloons, snow sculptures, and air sketches, even though he has to resort to wishful violence against his bullying sister. Lucy, now a ripe old 4, has to face such concerns as the Earth being worn down by people's feet and whether Santa exists. And already concerned about getting married, she tries to divert Schroeder's attention from Beethoven either by logic (what's the sense in learning Beethoven sonatas if you don't win a prize?), by sympathy ("My favorite piece is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in Asia Minor"), or by violence, and pulls away the football from Charlie Brown for the first time (December 1956). She also teaches her brother "little-known facts" about the world (palm trees were so named because people can fit their hand around them), which gives Charlie Brown stomach aches and formed part of the stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. But she'll never lose an argument as long as she can end it with a well-placed insult. Such is the misery of Charlie Brown, who also has to endure his failure to fly a kite, his complete failure on the baseball diamond, and misery during any holiday. That he does endure, however, makes him one of the heroes of our time. The third volume of Fantagraphics Books' handsome Complete Peanuts series includes a foreword by Matt Groening and a Charles M. Schulz retrospective by Gary Groth. --David Horiuchi

From Booklist

The uniform hardcover series reprinting all 50 years of the classic comic strip Peanuts continues. Many ingredients that would sustain the strip for a half-century are already in place, from Linus' dependence on his security blanket to Schroeder's rejection of Lucy in favor of Beethoven to Snoopy's efforts to impersonate other species. A few elements on view in this third volume in the series would soon vanish, however, such as Charlie Brown's loudmouthed counterpart, Charlotte Braun. On the other hand, a long-lasting device debuts when Lucy first snatches the football from Charlie Brown's impending kick. Only a few topical references--coonskin caps, Willie Mays, Howdy Doody--betray these strips' age. As Simpsons creator Matt Groening points out in the introduction, "there was nothing cutesy or condescending about the Peanuts gang." These early strips show that as well as timeless humor, it is such melancholic aspects as natural-born fussbudget Lucy's bitterness and Charlie Brown's frustrations over baseball, kites, valentines, and just about everything else he attempts that make them resound to this day. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 346 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (May 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560976470
• ISBN-13: 978-1560976479
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 8.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #151,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #70 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Publishers > Fantagraphics

More About the Author

Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922 in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).

In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post--as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.

He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts--and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate). The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952.

Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day--and the day before his last strip was published--having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand--an unmatched achievement in comics.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Volume in A Great Series, April 18, 2005

By 

K. Palmer (Illinois) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Hardcover)

This book constitutes the third in a proposed 25 volume series setting out the entire history of the Peanuts comic strip (this book covers the years 1955 and 1956). I have reviewed the first two books of the series and had nothing but great things to say about these books. The presentation of this new volume is great as always (with a surprise of Pig Pen making the cover). If you have read Peanuts strip books over the years, a lot more of these strips are going to be familiar to you than the previous two books as many of these strips have been published many times over the years. But there are still plenty of strips that you probably haven't seen in this book that should bring a smile to your face.

You'll see in this book Linus mature from a toddler to the well-spoken and intelligent character he was for the strips 40+ remaining years. Snoopy truly becomes "Snoopy" with his thought balloons and imagination taking over (the imitations of Violet, Lucy, a moose and Mickey Mouse are dead on). Schroeder assumes the straight man role from Shermy, whose role is significantly reduced in these two years. Lucy becomes the world champion fussbudget (with an impressive library of books on fussing for research). Charlie Brown becomes Charlie Brownier as his losing ways magnify during this time (with the highlight being Lucy's first pulling of the football strip).

As with the previous volumes, there are some strips presented of lower quality due to the fact the publishers haven't been able to find good qulity strips for reproduction. I can live with this so long as they have something.

My only complaint about the series is that two volumes a year just isn't fast enough! That will mean the last volume will be published in the spring of 2016!

On a final note, to the first reviewer, I did read somewhere that there is a good chance there will be a box set that will contain this volume plus the fourth volume to be published in the fall, so keep checking Amazon (it isn't listed now).

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touches My Memory, May 21, 2005

By 

Timothy Haugh (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Hardcover)

Anyone who is reading this doesn't really need to be told the joys of Peanuts; otherwise you wouldn't have bought this book. And the joys of these little volumes are legion, from the introductions by various writers (this time Matt Groening of Simpsons fame) to the comic strips themselves. Overall, this volume, covering 1955-1956, is another triumph.

The only reason I wanted to make a particular comment about this volume is that, for the first time, I read strips that I knew. Granted, I wouldn't even be born for more than a decade so I never saw these strips in their first run but this is part and parcel of the Peanuts story. When I was a kid and I visited my grandmother's house, she had paperbacks containing old Peanuts strips. I don't even remember the titles, but I remember the strips: they all starred Snoopy and they showed him impersonating other animals (like the python) and other characters (like Lucy). All these strips are in this volume.

In the previous two volumes my key joy had been seeing the beginning and reading strips I had never seen before. In this volume there was still some of that but my overriding feeling was that of visiting my grandmother's house when I was a kid. It is a nice feeling.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More familiar material, yet every bit as fascinating!, June 21, 2005

By 

Christopher Barat (Owings Mills, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956 (Hardcover)

Third "verse," same as the first and the second... well, sort of. As in the first and second volumes, TCP V3 serves up straightforward, black-and-white, chronological helpings of the daily and Sunday Peanuts strips, with a celebrity introduction (by Matt Groening, in this case), a generic Schulz mini-bio, and a useful (but somewhat incomplete) index tacked on for good measure. As in the second volume, some of the previously unreprinted strips do not reproduce well because of low-quality source material (though the fuzziness seems a little less pronounced than in V2, perhaps because there were more client papers to choose from by this time). The one big difference this time around: Many of these strips will be recognizable to long-time Peanuts fans. We are now standing on the edge of an immense ocean of heavily reprinted material from the strip's true glory days, and so there will be fewer surprises in store for those seeking the new and unfamiliar. It will be interesting to see how mass-market sales are affected by this shift.

Not that there aren't a goodly number of "Ooh, I never knew THAT" moments in this collection. Schulz started to work direct pop-culture references into his work at about this time -- many Peanuts fans may recall a strip or two in which Charlie Brown wears a Davy Crockett hat, or Snoopy imitates "Msssp Mssspe" (Mickey Mouse) - but until now, I wasn't aware of how many of them there actually were. You'll find references to Miss Frances (of "Ding Dong School"), Howdy Doody, impending satellite shots, Duke Snider, American agricultural policy, missile defense, sci-fi movies, the mid-50s "pink and charcoal" fashion fad, and numerous riffs on the Crockett phenomenon. (Charlie Brown, surrounded by Crockett merchandise, is moved to cry, "Where will it all end?" - and by volume's end, characters are wondering whatever happened to ole Davy what's his name.) There might even be some references to then-popular ad campaigns that I haven't yet been able to identify. Schulz was a creative genius independent of any outside influences, but he was evidently willing to hang gags on ephemera almost from the beginning.

During this period, Charlie Brown really began to mutate into the "Rats/Good grief/I can't stand it" "eternal loser" we all know and love. In these early days, though, his constant whining about how no one likes him, how inept he is, etc. can get on one's nerves. He has not yet acquired the *Sigh*-laden fatalism of later years and can often react quite violently and emotionally when he is thwarted, frustrated, or just feeling depressed. In this volume, Schulz really puts Charlie through the wringer in three agonizing "continued" stories: his first losing fight against a not-yet-kite-eating-but-certainly-kite-absorbing tree, his first really big failure in a baseball game, and his failure to receive a Christmas card (he is ultimately reduced to going out and buying himself one). Rest assured, he does not take any of these misfortunes well. Also remember that it was this version of Charlie that first attracted many readers to the strip. Postwar angst, anyone? Thankfully, you need no neuroses to continue to enjoy this marvelous project. It's a must purchase for anyone who loves great cartoonery and American pop culture.