I now have the board book The Many Faces of Snoopy (not to be confused with the strip collection Many Faces of Snoopy, nor the strip collection The Many Faces of Snoopy.) It consists of eight two-page spreads, each looking at a different Snoopy persona, with text from Jason Cooper and illustrations by Vicki Scott, whose work we always like.

But for the Peanuts purists, it gets off to an odd start. The first persona covered is The Masked Marvel, who they posit as a cape-wearing superhero, capable of flight. This is odd if you’ve just read Many Faces of Snoopy, where you read the actual Masked Marvel strips, and he’s always a sportsman (first an arm wrestler, then a golfer.) Schulz pretty clearly was channeling not superheroes when he first presented Snoopy as the Masked Marvel, but professional wrestling. Masked wrestlers have been around since 1873 (according to Pro Wrestling Illustrated), and the original Masked Marvel was a wrestler who appeared at bouts at the Manhattan Opera House in late 1915, well before the superhero era. (If it seems odd to you that an opera house was hosting wrestling, realize that while it was opened in 1906 by Oscar Hammerstein – no, not the one you’re thinking of, his grandfather – to compete with the Metropolitan Opera, they did such a successful job that after four years, the Met paid Hammerstein over a million bucks to stop hosting opera for at least a decade.)

Luckily, the target audience for a board book neither knows nor cares about all of the decades of strips and history of the Peanuts. And the drawing is nice!

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