I’ve seen standup comic Patton Oswalt perform live just once, as part of The J. Keith Van Straaten Show, a non-broadcast talk show that was done in a 99-seat theater. And on that night, he did a bit about Peanuts… but not your usual standup “Boy, that Peppermint Patty  – what a lesbian!” schtick. No, Oswalt was talking about how in the last few years of Peanuts, the once great and insightful strip had gone totally off the rails, spinning off into wild non sequiturs. He whipped off a couple exaggerated example of such strips.

Now, I’m far from being in agreement with Oswalt about those years. (I thought particularly the final three years were an impressive creative upswing; not, perhaps, Peanuts at its absolute peak, but if for some reason the first 47 years of the strip had gone unpublished, in 1998 Peanuts would’ve been deemed the hot new strip, and Rerun a breakthrough character.) But whatever his opinion was, something was clear: that Oswalt had actually been paying some attention to the strip, with a sense of its history. Peanuts was something he took seriously enough to do serious comedy about. But that shouldn’t be surprising, as Oswalt is not just a comedy guy but also a comics guy, known to be a regular reader and even occasional writer of comic books.

As such, it didn’t shock me much to see Oswalt provide the introduction to The Complete Peanuts 1985-1986… and it also doesn’t surprise me that the introduction doesn’t actually address the strips within, but expresses a general love for the strip. After all, this isn’t Peanuts at its best, the mid-1980s is (in my opinion) Peanuts at its nadir (but remember that if there’s such a thing as damning with faint praise, then there’s also endorsing with faint criticism. Peanuts is one of those things like pizza and cuddling, good even at its weakest, and even weak Peanuts is better than most other strips.)

Every era of Peanuts seems to have a creative focus – not a character who necessarily appears the most, but one into whom Schulz seemed to put his most creative effort. The 1950s started with Charlie Brown, then a bout of Linus, then later on was the start of a long Snoopy era. The 1970s was Peppermint Patty, the 1990s started with a return to Charlie Brown and ended with the reign or Rerun. But in the 1980s, it was Spike, and that’s problematic. The Spike strips really seem like a different comic strip, The entire Spike-interacts-with-cacti milieu has its own rhythm and texture, an there are certainly people who think it’s great stuff… but simply having a general liking of Peanuts does not mean one is going to like Spike.

Going through the strips, some things that caught my eye:

• The “getting knocked off one’s feet by memories of a lost love” series of strips always hit me as a nice thing.
• In March of 1985, something looks a bit off on the inks to me… not radically, but it’s like he’s trying a slightly different nib or somesuch.
• April 22, 1985, Snoopy admits to snooping!
• July 25, 1985: praise is given for “funds from the private sector”; I’m sure I’ll see this one excerpted for someone’s political discourse.
• Marcie falls asleep in class! Marcie!
• In October ’85, Sally says that she and her classmates will be 80 when Halley’s Comet returns in 2062… which means that she’s in a class full of 3 year olds! (But since it’s Sally, we can simply assume that she muffed the math.)
• In 1986, Schulz begins using printed or computer-generated tones to fill in some objects.
• Why is the World War I Flying Ace requesting comic books? Anachronism!
• I love the backgrounds of the Beagle Scout hikes; the textures communicate the scene so well.
• The question is raised (but not answered) about the appropriateness of praying for a sports victory – but not in the realm of “what sort of thing is prayer meant for”, but simply whether it’s fair to ask higher powers to back your team. In another context, the question is raised about whether quoting scripture is “fair”.
• Any plan for romance which involves using Charlie Brown as your wingman is doomed. Linus should’ve known that.
• This book has the Tapioca Pudding strips, a personal favorite; I even tipped my hat to Ms. Pudding in one of my stories about Licensable BearTM (a not dissimilar concept). She starts off in a run of a dozen strips, two weeks worth of dailies…. but, unlike other storylines that run six strips or a multiple thereof, it starts and ends mid-week. And then the three other TP strips that appear in the book are all on Mondays. (The mid-week start makes sense for the six-strip run on Sally trying to make a tree fall over, because the story really needs the last strip for closure; cartoonists sometimes avoid making the Saturday strip important, lest people who only read the paper on their commute to work miss it.)
• Ah, 11/1/86 strip only makes sense if you know San Francisco Giants baseball circa that year. Which I do not – thank you Google for all your kind assistance!

This is certainly not the book I’d recommend as anyone’s introduction to Peanuts… but should readers of the AAUGH Blog buy it? Of course. And it’s available now for immediate shipping. Amazon appears to be having some sort of problem with the boxed set of this and the previous volume, but BN.com at the moment has it for $30.54, a real bargain on a pair of $28.99 books.

Note: A copy of this volume was provided for review by the publisher. This job doesn’t come with as many hot babes and cool cars as you might suspect, but occasionally, a free Peanuts book. Also, I suppose I should disclose that I now have some business relationship with the publisher of this volume… but I think you’ll find that this review is reasonably consistent with previous reviews of this series, which predate that relationship.

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