Customer Reviews

The Complete Peanuts 1981-1982 (Vol. 16) (The Complete Peanuts)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is something reassuring about the steady arrival of these collections of the Peanuts gang. Honestly, as I've said in virtually every volume that I've reviewed (not all of them) each book is a trip down memory lane as I recall what I was doing when these panels appeared.

The 1981-1982 volume continues with the same members but with the introduction of Marbles, another of Snoopy's siblings. We also see Spike drafted into the Army (Snoopy's imaginary WWI experiences). Charlie Brown plays for Peppermint Patti's baseball team and ends up blowing a fantastic lead. Charlie Brown's family also gets into farming, etc., etc.

If you're a fan of the Peanuts neighborhood then you'll grab this 16th volume. If you've missed one of the best retrospective publishing efforts of all time, it might be time to get on board and enjoy a new tradition.

I highly, highly recommend.

Peace to all.

I am a huge fan of the genius of Charles Schulz - self-made, all-American, commercially savvy, an original. What a tremendous achievement, producing all these years of Peanuts comics by hand, day after day. How can this rate anything less than 5 stars? This volume was particularly meaningful for me because I remember starting to read Peanuts in the local paper in the early 1980s. Wonderful social commentary on tennis, politics, and religion. This deserves a place on your bookshelf!

I do so love the periodic arrival of a new volume in The Complete Peanuts series. They never fail to bring a smile to my face. And now my kids are getting old enough to appreciate Snoopy and the gang. It's great.

There's a lot of good stuff this time around. Peppermint Patty gets a lot of play in this volume, with her golf, her support of women athletes, and, of course, her D- grades. We get to meet Marbles, another of Snoopy's brothers. We see plenty of Snoopy as well as his bird scout troop. And there's enough of Charlie Brown, Linus, and crabby Lucy to keep everyone happy. The Complete Peanuts is some of the best there is.

I've reviewed most of the volumes of this series elsewhere -- our fine hosts won't let me link out, so you'll have to take my word for it -- and so I've already said most of the things worth saying about Charles Schulz's wonderful creation PEANUTS. And this latest volume in Fantagraphics's wonderful reprinting that strip is now solidly into Schulz's later, less interesting years, so there's less that *can* be said.

Peanuts was funny and entertaining at this point, of course -- amusing and laugh-out-loud and wry by turns -- but it hadn't been surprising for nearly a decade, and most of its characters had first hardened into caricatures, and then into a collection of standard mannerisms. The PEANUTS of 1981 was an utterly professional entertainment machine, and still the pure product of Charles Schulz's own pen and mind. But its pleasures in the '80s were like those of watching a late-season baseball game between two teams out of contention: it doesn't mean anything, and won't have any real effect on anything, but it's a quite agreeable way to spend a few hours.

If Schulz had been born later, or had a different temperament -- well, let's say it straight: if the world had been substantially different than it actually was -- then, maybe, he could have hung up the Peanuts hat, walked away from the massive pot of money Snoopy generated every year, and moved on to some new creation. No, honestly, that never would have happened; not in any plausible version of the past century. And even if it had, would whatever new thing the 58-year-old Schulz made been as interesting and fresh as what the 28-year-old Schulz had done? So that's just windy talk, and not worth pursuing.

What Schulz *did* was PEANUTS, and he did it for a hair shy of fifty years. Not all of them are works of genius -- not all of anything by anyone is. And there are only occasional flashes of that genius here -- Sally's beanbag camp, a few moments with Peppermint Pattie -- but this is still an important part of the larger work that is PEANUTS, and I'm happy to have it on my shelf.

My son loves the Peanuts carton books and is collecting all issues of them. He yelled when he opened his Christmas gift and found out it was the Peanuts 1981 book. We had to remind him to open his other gifts.