Peanuts All-Stars is a curious choice for a book. With other recent books out there having focused on the baseball strips and the golf strips, this one is meant to cover the other key sports from the strip. It has sections for basketball, football, hockey, and tennis, with plenty of strips for each, running in order from the early days of the strip.

From the early days, yes, but generally not running to the end. The football section, for example, cuts off at 1991. And yet, with so many further strips which could have been included, they do include strips pulled from the middle of storylines; if the book is not meant to be complete, then it would seem that those would be the wiser ones to lose. And as a marketing matter, I have trouble seeing why the football section isn’t simply a seperate book – it’s long enough, and it would seem better to target to an individual audience.

When you run strips on a single theme together, you often end up with a feeling of redundancy. Luckily, that is not the case here. Each of the sections has certain repeating tropes that are actually good to read in close succession – Rerun trying to shoot baskets, zamboni humor, and especially the strips where Lucy pulls the football away. You won’t get all of the football-pull strips, alas (cutting the football strips off in 1991 means that we don’t get the last of the pull-the-football strips, a suitable capper to the whole series.)

The strips are mostly run in black and white, whether daily or Sunday, with a few color strips at the end of a couple sections. There are up to three dailies or one Sunday on each page, with the page background decorated with little color Peanuts figures.

All in all, not a bad book of strips. And it’s a great gift for your friends who like football, hockey, tennis, and basketball, but hate baseball and golf!

And hey, if you order Peanuts All-Stars together with The Complete Peanuts volume 5, that’s a big enough order to qualify for the free super-saver shipping in the U.S.

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