Tug's Pick of the Week
The
Complete Peanuts
Volume One:
1950-1952
Hey there, folks. In order to help our work-laden webmaster out, this "Pick of the Week" is going to be a short one. Don’t worry, though — this has no reflection on the quality of the pick or even the number of good comics coming out.
I always liked the Sunday funnies. They were actually one of the reasons why I became such a voracious reader as a child and led, at least in some partial way, to me picking up my first comic book proper. I liked most of them (except Andy Capp — it’s really hard for a child to understand the humor of a guy not getting along with his wife), but there were only a few that I really loved.
I can remember going to the lower-school library and discovering that some of my favorite funnies had been going on long enough for nice book-sized collections of them to be published. There was one of these series whose collections I checked out constantly — occasionally just renewing them for a solid month at a time. I didn’t quite understand what Mrs. Owens the librarian meant when she jokingly threatened to “cut me off,” but I knew that keeping a boy away from his Peanuts is just plain wrong.
The Complete Peanuts, Volume One: 1950-1952 marks the first of a series of Peanuts collections from Fantagraphics that will span 24 volumes and 12 years — and collect every single Peanuts strip ever produced. I don’t think I have to go on about how Peanuts is one of the greatest comic strips of all time and how its wit, charm, and innocence combine with Charles Schulz’s art to create timeless elements of comedy that can be enjoyed by anyone who ever had a childhood.
(Well, maybe I do have to go on about it.)
While I could write a thesis about this strip and what it has meant to me and to the world, I will instead just say that by collecting these works, Fantagraphics is doing a great service to us all. The books themselves are well-designed and are going to look absolutely amazing all together on a shelf somewhere in 12 years when they are all out. I know it’s a long time to be collecting something — but just think, by the time it’s over, the series will collect half a century of goodness.
If you come in and we are sold out of the book, please just let us know. We can order you one in a flash. You certainly don’t want to miss out on this great collection — and we don’t want you to, either!
Also, don’t forget to watch out this week (and the rest of the
month) for the "X-Men Reload" event. All the X-books are a-changin’
this month, and this week you can pick up Uncanny X-Men # 444 and
Exiles # 46.
Uncanny features the return of the Chris Claremont and Alan Davis creative super-duo, and one of my guilty comic pleasures — the X-Men playing sports!
And in Exiles, the team drops in on the actual Marvel Universe and runs into everyone’s favorite freak, Beak!