Nice Shot, Snoopy [Mass Market Paperback]

Charles M. Schulz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 1988

More cartoons featuring America's funniest kids -- Peanuts!

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

More cartoons featuring America's funniest kids -- Peanuts!

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (January 12, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449214044
• ISBN-13: 978-0449214046
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,785,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contains strips not easy to find elsewhere, August 19, 2000

By 

Timothy Chow - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nice Shot, Snoopy (Mass Market Paperback)

This is one of the set of 99 Fawcett Crest Peanuts reprint books, and one of the few that is still in print (as of August 2000). Although the quality of the Fawcett Crest reprint books is generally not as high as that of the other standard reprint series (Peanuts Parade, Topper, Andrews & McMeel, etc.), this book is worth snapping up because it reprints strips from the Peanuts Parade book "The Way of the Fussbudget is Not Easy," which is difficult to find even on eBay. It's true that you may be able to find the Peanuts Classics reprint of the Parade book without too much difficulty, but the Classics version is defective and is missing many strips. If you are a serious Peanuts fan and enjoy seeing strips that you've never seen before, this book is a good one to get.

Those who are not staunch fans of Peanuts, however, may wish to look elsewhere, because the strips in this book date from the early 1980's, which is a period when Peanuts started to decline in popularity. Strips from the late 1950's through the early 1970's have the broadest public appeal. One book you may want to consider is "Peanuts Treasury," which reprints some of the best Peanuts strips from the early 1960's.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best, July 16, 2008

By 

ABC Snoopy "Adam" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nice Shot, Snoopy (Mass Market Paperback)

This book has the last 4 months of 1984. I love this book. I love the comic when Schorder kisses Lucy but she thinks it was Snoopy. This book has comics from The Way of the Fussbudget is not Easy witch was the final Peanuts Classics. I love this book and you will be able to see this in the Complete Peanuts 1983-1984 in the year 2012.

5.0 out of 5 stars Their problems are our problems, reading about theirs helps us deal with ours, February 28, 2009

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Nice Shot, Snoopy (Mass Market Paperback)

Part of the appeal of Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip is that nearly everyone has a better life than he does. Everything he does fails in one form or another, from trying to kick the football to flying a kite to being a friend. This book concentrates more on the other characters in the strip; a large number of the captions are about Snoopy, Woodstock and Spike. They too have their foibles and desires that remain unsatisfied.

Yet through it all, we are amused, for while their problems are similar to ours, we can laugh at that the Peanuts characters because fundamentally they only exist in our minds. As we translate the marks on the paper into events we interpret in our own way, our similar problems become tempered and easier to deal with.