For most of my childhood, Peanuts was at the top of the comics page in the local paper. Garfield might have supplanted them in the number one spot for a time. This dates me, I realize. That’s okay, my being dated is why I’m writing about Charlie Brown and Snoopy: I decided to read all of Peanuts in my forties. I turned forty in December, so time to start.

This project is possible because Fantagraphics is republishing all fifty years of Peanuts. No wonder it seemed that Peanuts was always there (and always would be) — it started twenty years before I was born, and continued on the funny pages after I moved away from home and stopped reading the local paper. Charles Schulz published the comic strip from 1950 to shortly before his death in 2000. It was his life’s work.

The editions Fantagraphics are publishing aim to be worthy of a life’s work. I’ve decided to go for the two issues together in a box set configuration, so I get four years of the strip side by side, protected by a sturdy, well-designed slipcase. (They are up to 1978 now, and and at the rate they are going, will hit fifty years before I do.) The books are designed by Seth and include essays and interviews. This volume includes an introduction by Garrison Keilor, an essay by David Michaelis, and an interview with Schulz. The library geek part of me was happy to see an index.

Most importantly, this first volume collects the strips from Peanuts debut toward the end of 1950 through December 1952. Despite the popularity of Peanuts collections over the years, some of these strips have never been republished. They are printed three strips per page, with a whole page for Sunday’s comic, but not in color. I imagine the cost of color would have been prohibitive, and the choice works: adding color to the collection would have felt gaudy. Even the color on the cases and dust jackets is understated — the focus is on the lines, on what Schulz created in black and white.

What he created was funny little stories, sometimes about melancholy, depression, and quiet desperation, though we don’t often think of them that way. These strips can be a comfort, an amusement, can provide a moment to stop and think. Here you see Charlie Brown before his shirt gets the zig-zaggy stripe; how Linus was introduced as a baby as was Schroeder. You see the small common things that set the groundwork for what would become a life’s work.

I’m looking forward to collecting and reading all the volumes, seeing what changes and what doesn’t. Charlie Brown will always be Charlie Brown.

I’ve had this book for awhile, but I put off reading it because I was leery of the emotional reaction I suspected it would provoke. This might make me kind of chicken, but I don’t really think so. If I was really chicken, this book would still be on my unread shelf (ok, unread bookcase) and I wouldn’t tell you it made me cry.

Not that it is a weepfest. But really, childhood and adolescence is brutal and Barry remembers what it was like. She’s funny and painfully honest and she draws interesting monkeys and octopus-like critters as well as angry mothers. The pen and ink and colors are vibrant without being in-your-face or cartoony in a bad way, and I really like the collage elements occasionally mixed in. Imagine pulling some treasure out of the kitchen junk drawer of from your childhood: her work feels like that.

Barry wants everyone to experience the freedom that can come from creating. The last few pages of the book are instructions on how to draw your own demon. (I haven’t done this yet, but I haven’t dismissed the idea, either.) She sees, from her current vantage point, that “the nine-year-old version of me who made up all those ‘classified stories’ would think that this one has a very happy ending.” This, in a panel where adolescent her, reading the lost and found classifieds, sees “Lost. Somewhere around puberty. Ability to make up stories. Happiness depends on it. Please write.”

Highly recommended, especially if the idea of reading it makes you nervous.

This book is a collection of comic short stories, varying in length from single page/panels to nearly forty pages. The theme is dark/unsettling/creepy, and most of the stories deliver on that, in various shades of gray or simply stark black and white. There’s a bit of everything weird in this collection: prison story, underwater, outer space, ghosts, religious freakiness.

The subtle ones are my favorites — ok, fine, Shaun Tan’s works are my favorites. Shaun Tan is the reason I wanted this book; I’m a fan, and he doesn’t disappoint. The cover, with its two figures down near a surburban fence — are they hiding? cowering? expectant? — with a giant red rabbit’s eye peering over the fence in their direction is definitely unsettling. So too are Tan’s moral lessons (#32: Innocence; #7: Regret; #12: Knowledge). I also liked Mel Tregonning’s “Night” with its uncertain lifeforms growing in the dark, behind a child’s back.

It’s the weirdness that lurks in the every day, in the room that looks like yours, in a neighborhood you can recognize, that is the most disturbing.

This small book (more mass market paperback size than trade paperback, only very thin compared to that fat airplane or beach reading fare) contains a charming story. With green and black ink on white pages Hailey’s childhood summers playing outdoors unfolds.

Sometimes using panels, sometimes with one image filing the page, sometimes sketching breaking into rough sketches, Larson takes us back through memory to childhood. The story isn’t cloying or too cute. Instead, it’s earnest and playful and invites readers to consider the comforts of storytelling.

Salamander seems best kind of imaginary childhood friend — one you can find your way to revisit. Recommended.

Looking for the ISBN number on this book, it struck me how oddly some books come together: this is put out by Yale University Press, printed in China, and the majority of artists in it are European.

The editors don’t talk much about how they arrived at their selections. They don’t have much to say at all, opting instead for very brief introductory material and short, blurb-like commentary with each selection. The effect is similar to reading the wall-text at a museum exhibit.

If you are a fan of independently produced/published graphic novels, you’ll find much to like in this collection (Jason, Jordan Crane, Joe Sacco). That there are no superheroes makes sense; this book isn’t about genre in that way. I don’t mean to knock them for who they did include — I love Tom Gauld’s work, as well as Simone Lia’s and they are the front and back covers — but it is easy to wonder at who was chosen and who was not. Unless you have no exposure to contemporary comic art, you’ll probaby find yourself compiling a list of folks who could be included in a book on this topic, but for whatever reason, weren’t included here. I know I did: Actus Tragicus, Craig Thompson, Shaun Tan, and Lynda Barry, just to get started.

I don’t think the editors’ ambition was to present an exhaustive collection, however. This is more a sampling of contempory work, with barely enough framework holding things together — leaving plenty of room for exploration. It’s a large book, and the art is reproduced in color and black and white at high quality — definitely worth leaving out on the coffee table, if you are the sort that would leave an illustration of a giant robot out. Recommended.