Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to writing up The Complete Peanuts 1959 to 1960. I apologize for the delay. But lets face it, you don’t need a review. If you’re the sort of person who reads The AAUGH Blog, you should get this book, and all the other volumes in the Complete Peanuts series.

Does this book have strips that you won’t see in other books? Oh, you betcha. Lots of unfamiliar strips, including continuities where you might have seen one or two of the strips before.

In terms of significance to the Peanuts canon, the biggest thing is the birth of Sally. This book has all the vital Sally-as-a-baby stuff. We see the celebration of her birth and the gang’s concern that she not look like her brother. We see Charlie Brown face the conflict between taking Sally for a stroller walk and playing baseball. We see her start to walk – fourteen months after she was born, which means that she was actually aging in real time! Ah, babies, they grow so fast… and then slow down and don’t age for decades. And we see her form her crush on Linus.

It’s a big one for Peanuts holiday fans. We see the first couple years of the Great Pumpkin as well as continued celebration of Beethoven’s birthday. I found particularly interesting that there was dicussion of Great Pumpkin vs. Santa Claus, because it messes with the joke. It works far better when the confusion is implied; it seemed a bit like the joke was being explained. The Great Pumpkin is not one of those gags that need subtitles.

There are a couple of library-oriented storylines which should catch the attention of librarians and those who love them. One focuses on Charlie Brown’s anxiety over having lost a library book; the other on Linus celebrating having received his first library card.

There are, of course, strips with dated specificity. Name-checked are Leonard Bernstein, Mort Sahl, Sam Snead, Casey Stengel, and Dr. (not Mr.) Spock. But there’s one strip that may actually have become more relevant with the passage of time. It’s at the end of a week-long storyline in which Lucy is discussing how Charlie Brown might some day be President (?!) and if she married him, she could be first lady. (This was in 1960, which was of course an election year, and thus questions of the Presidency were in the air.) It ends on June 11 with a strip where she is asking “Why should I settle for being just First Lady? Why shouldn’t I be President myself?” Should former First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton make her expected run for the presidency in 2008, I expect we’ll see this strip brought up in certain circles… particularly with the revelation of Lucy’s ultimate goal.

(That’s not Lucy’s only professional goal covered here. We see her working at a career as an editorial cartoonist, presaging her not-yet-born youngest brother’s work as an underground cartoonist in the strip’s final years.)

For sports fans, we have Snoopy boxing with a boxing glove on his nose, and also his stint at The Mad Punter. Reading this volume just after reading Peanuts All-Stars points out how that volume, whch had some oddly out-of-context strips taken from storylines, didn’t include all of the strip in the storylines it did cover.

Lots of strips you haven’t read before. Lots of strips you have now in proper order. An introductory interview with Whoopi Goldberg, and what is likely the only index in history to include the word “ggogles”. This is a book to be bought, read, and kept handy.

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