Peanuts 1963-1964 Book

This is the one I wanted to read. I read the first two collections, when Schulz, the comics genius, was developing his craft, the 1950-51 and the 52-53 volumes. The somewhat (much?) curmudgeonly Schulz hated the title an editor had forced on him for this comics series, Peanuts, which he said "lacked dignity," something that he thought he brought to his craft every day, and he hated the limitations thematically and artistically that were forced on him by space and fifties ideology, choices made for him by the culture and my editors. He was no Crumb, no underground comics guy, he wanted a place in the daily funnies, and he got it, he had a huge audience, but he also felt it cramped him. In the beginning the comics were grumpier, edgier than a decade later, when, in middle school, I was reading them like a Daily (Religious) Devotional. Oh, and we read those religious tracts every day at the table, too, in my Dutch Calvinist house in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but maybe for me Charlie Brown and Snoopy comics were a kind of secular devotional, a better reflection of the world I lived in, my Dickinson St. neighborhood, with a range of kids that played all day together all summer after a winter of sledding. Charlie Brown's neighborhood was in some sense like mine, and I was its Charlie Brown, sort of picked on, a nerd, sweet and vulnerable who needed "all the friends I can get" (one of the punchlines from the year's comics, that was printed on a yellow sweatshirt my mom bought me in 1965, when I was 12 years old!). For me it was less the also much read C.S Lewis's Narnia Chronicles (though I did read them and loved them then), nor was it Milne's Winnie The Pooh stories, which I didn't read until later in earnest. Also a dysfunctional bunch of "kids," Pooh's world is, but for me it was Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy, those sweet and only slightly dysfunctional neighborhood friends.

So, as I said, this is the one I wanted to read, the 1963-64 volume, to on the one hand, to see how Schulz was developing as an artist--I would never have thought of comics as art then, but art they were and are, of course, a powerful and quick world sketched and consumed daily and quickly, with a smile, over Cheerios and oj. And here his craft is 12 years in very assured, a clearer, stronger line, sharper, more confident, and the tone visually and thematically is a little softer, as Schulz emerges as less curmudgeony in the public eye, and more as America's Beloved Comic writer. oOh, there were others I would have read in the daily strips (and the gloriously full color Sunday funnies, especially!): Walt Kelly's Pogo, Nancy, Prince Valiant, The Family Circus, Ben Casey, Blondie, Ketcham's Dennis the Menace, Dr Kildare, many others, but wasn't it really Charlie Brown that was the most loved, the top, the best? It was for me, really, especially in 1963-64, 6th grade for me, Oakdale Public School. So if it was on the one hand that I read this volume to see the development of an artist and the emergence of a cultural phenomenon, it was just as important for me to revisit my youth, my nerdy, big eared and freckled junior high years. So I would have read these at 12 and 13, so I was eager to see myself and my times in these, and they worked for me, and I remembered so many of them, so insightful and funny and yes, warmer and sweeter than the early stuff, but just so good.

The one complaint I would have about this book is the Hal Hartley introduction. Why him, and in the intro he seems to feel the same way, that he was not a particular fan. eh. Compared to the intros and essays with the first two volumes, this was disappointing. But the book is great for Schulz, obviously.