When I received my provided-by-the-publisher reviewer copy of The Complete Peanuts 1995-1996, I knew instantly what I really wanted to get out of it. I was reminded by the cover blurb that said Introduction by RiffTrax MST3K, which may sound like arglebargle to many of you, but to me had me zooming for those opening text pages. “MST3K” is short for Mystery Science Theater 3000, a favorite old TV show built around running old movies, generally bad ones, and having a cast of characters add snarky comments to the proceedings. RiffTrax deals in much the same effort, generally providing downloadable audiotracks to accompany movies you choose to watch. I go to the start of the intro looking to see some of the creative names I’m used to from my old MST3K-watching days… and instead see “Foreword by Conor Lastowka & Sean Thomason” who I’m sure are perfectly nice and funny and wonderful and perhaps even famous people, but whose names I didn’t recognize. But their foreword is good, talking about what an unlikely success Peanuts is, and how the very things that make it great do not sound like the sort of things that make a commercially successful work.

Reaching the end of the text, I find “On the following pages, our RiffTrax colleagues Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett have, for the first time ever, riffed comic strips.” Those are the names I know, some of the in-front-of-the-screen names from MST3K… and they’re doing what they should be doing, which is adding their commentary to Peanuts strips! Oh, it’s only four strips, alas, but it is fun.

As for the body of the book itself, I’ve not yet delved through it, but there’s really no urgency. This is material that has been well-reprinted before, completely and in sequence. I know the material… and I like the material. Whenever people claim that the quality of Peanuts declined over time, I see where they’re coming from (I certainly prefer the 1960s material to the 1980s material), but I always need to point out that the last five years of the strip were a real creative upswing. Much of that had to do with this being the era of Rerun – Schulz took a character that had been a minor background character who he had regretted creating, and instead turned him into the creative center of the strip. Rerun’s loner sensibility and his blunt reflections on his world made for a fresh strip, and while this is not the material at its peak  (it kept getting better during the final years), it does get rolling here.

Anyway, you can order the book now, it’ll scheduled to ship from Amazon early next month, and obviously it has already been printed so not much is likely to interfere with that plan.

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