Conflict of interest note: I have had a business relationship with the publisher Fantagraphics on multiple Peanuts-oriented projects in the past and may well continue to do so. No review copies of these volumes were provided.

It seems almost pointless to review the boxed set that I just got of volumes 3 and 4 of Peanuts Every Sunday, covering the years 1961-1970. After all, this is almost exactly what I would point to as Peak Peanuts (really, if you had a boxed set of volumes 2 and 3, that would probably be exactly the peak.) Looking through volume 3 and realizing that they are all memorable, and here they are reprinted as they should be, large and in color and in the intended panel arrangement… yes, this is the stuff. This is stuff that you could thrown down in front of just about anyone and they would recognize it as great. So yes, of course, this big heavy brick of a boxed set is recommended.

Volume 3 has an intro Luc Sante and 4 by Max Apple, both literary types with whom I am unfamiliar. After all the ever-so-many intros to Peanuts books, its unsurprising that these don’t break new ground; they each combine the author’s personal youth relationship with the strip with some sense of how these characters are key examples of literary symbols. However, Sante pulls it off much better – his ability as an immigrant child to understand America through Peanuts hits a really good mark.

The color is all done fresh for these books, and there are times (particularly in volume 3) where you can see that perhaps there was limited source material available, as the fine lines dissolve a bit (most visible in the grass and Linus’s hair.) However, that’s an inherent curse when dealing with half-century-old material where the image just had to be good enough for the rough newspaper press of the day. But Fantagraphics has taken the time to do all the colors fresh, not to change the color scheme but to have it work with the higher-resolution printing that’s available to them, so everything looks quite nice all in all. Good selections have been made for images for the covers and decorative pages

The most pleasing little they-paid-attention-to-detail bit: The inside of the boxed set box.

The most displeasing they-shoulda-paid-attention-to-detail bit: In the introduction to volume 4, Charles Schulz’s name is spelled three different ways. Admittedly, only two of them are wrong.

But you aren’t buying these for the intros. You are buying these, right? Go buy now!

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