So I have, in my hot’n’handsome li’l hands, a copy of The Complete Peanuts volume 25, collecting the final year-and-a-little of the newspaper strip, which is a good thing to have but not exactly hard to have come by before. But this is filled out with two other items of note: a foreword by President of the United States Barack Obama – just a basic one-page statement of I like Peanuts and everybody like Peanuts and Peanuts holds meaning, that’s the kind of thing one gets from a sitting president, but still, hey, sitting president! – and the complete run of “Li’l Folks”, the series of single panel kid-oriented gags that Schulz did for local papers in the day before “Peanuts”. Those haven’t been available before in a generally distributed book (although there is a collection available from the Schulz Museum, which has the added bonus of commentary by Derrick Bang). The Complete Peanuts format was well designed for running the daily and Sunday Peanuts strips that the books have consisted of up until this point, but it’s a horribly horizontal format for a the portrait-oriented “Li’l Folks” and so Fantagraphics has done this:

As myself a publisher of a book where the binding is at the top, I approve! And this may well be what ends up happening to some of the material that’s going to end up in Complete Peanuts 26, such as a the comic book stories.

Speaking of Complete Peanuts 26, I suppose I should caveat this coverage/review of 25 by saying that I have been paid for my work on that volume, and thus you should read my comments here with the awareness that I may have a conflict of interest. But then, my reviews of previous volumes should reflect that I feel that of course you should want all the Complete Peanuts volumes, because, hey, it’s the complete “Peanuts”! Go order it now (you still can get some good pre-shipping savings!)

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