Lest anyone fear that the preceding announcement regarding financial struggles at publisher Fantagraphics will delay or scuttle the publication of the first volume of Peanuts Every Sunday, this picture should allay your fears. The books have been printed, and should be shipping soon.

And how is the book? Well, it’s three-and-a-half years worth of Sunday Peanuts strips reproduced in color. So the proper answer is that it’s quite good, of course!

In terms of color, they went with the original color schemes, going off of proofs or printed copies where possible, or coloring in that style where sources could not be found. (And please note that the current reruns in the newspaper  are recolored, using modern gradients on strips that did not have them originally. That’s something you shan’t see here.) It should be noted, though, that this is an idealized form of that original coloring; the color is not made up of big visible dots. Perhaps more importantly, it is properly registered. Anyone who collects old newspapers clippings knows that the question is not whether you will find the color “out of register” (i.e., slipping past the black outlines), but merely how far out of register it will be. Uneven ink, bleed-through from color on the other side of the page… those part of the newspaper-reading experience are skipped over.

As for size, the strips as published here are larger than you would see in your current Sunday newspaper, albeit not as large as they saw print in the larger Sunday papers of the day. It’s not the largest reprinting of color Sundays in a Peanuts book; that honor probably goes to 1975’s Peanuts Jubilee (which was issued in several sizes; I’m referring to the largest of those sizes.) But this is ample… big enough to be impressive, bigger then you are ever likely to see for the vast majority of strips in this complete series.

Recommended, of course.

Note: the publisher provided a free copy for review purposes. That is one of the few benefits of being the AAUGH Blogger. That and the steady stream of comely young groupies is about it.

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