There’s a saying that I lean on from time to time, generally when talking about sex or pizza, that “you have to have some really bad ____ for it to be worse than not having it at all.” The same concepts holds true for Peanuts strip collections. You know I like them. (I’d certainly be wasting a lot of my life chronicling these things if I didn’t!)

Thing is, unless they are either amazing or awful, there’s not much to say about them. Truth is, I love a really great book because it’s great, and I got confess, that I love an awful one because it’s fun to pick apart in a review. But the new book Snoopy: Contact! is neither; like the rest of the AMP! Comics For Kids, it’s a reasonable reprint of Peanuts strips from one of the more respected eras (in this case, it’s a Snoopy-centric but not exclusively Snoopy set of strips that don’t have the dates on them, but look to be 1960s.) It’s not ideal; I prefer classic dailies in the black-and-white they were intended for, though the color is done smoothly. But it’s not horrible in anyway that would be fun to pull apart. It’s reasonably priced ($9.99 for 164 pages of strips), it has some cute special features (a poster of the cover, a guide to making a paper airplane, and a poster of the cover.) If I wasn’t a collector, I wouldn’t need this book, but if I wanted a book to hand my daughter, this would do well.

It’s a Peanuts strip collection… and that’s a good thing!

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