Now that you all have your copies of The Complete Peanuts volume 26: Comics and Stories (you do, don’t you? If not, click on that link and order one!), I thought I’d make a few notes on it. As I’ve mentioned here before, Derrick Bang, Timothy Chow, and I rounded up the material that makes up most of the book.

• My mentally working subtitle for the book was The Selected Apocrypha, honestly influenced more by a book of Sherlock Holmes “Published Apocrypha” than the source of the term related to additions to the Bible. Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth was the one who stuck the “Comics and Stories” name on there (one that should hold some weight with those familiar with the magazine Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories), and it is indeed the better choice.
• If the intro by Derrick, Tim, and myself seems a mite off on describing the book, realize that we wrote it before the final selections of what was to be included was made. We had been charged with finding at least a half book’s worth of material for the book, ended up with a full book’s worth (and a little more), and did not realize that Fantagraphics was planning to include the pre-Peanuts Saturday Evening Post cartoon, the Seth introduction, and the extended afterword. So there are mentions of the book having some things that actually ended up being trimmed out.
• We’ve relied on Jim Sasseville’s identification of which of the comic book stories were drawn by Schulz himself. There are a couple pieces that one might second-guess, but it has to be realized that Schulz produced most of his pages in an extreme rush to meet deadline, so things that look not-quite-Schulz might be Schulz-in-a-rush.
• I absolutely love some of the strips from The Brownie Book of Picture-Taking. Things like that really justify this volume to me; they aren’t just curiosities, but great examples of the Peanuts strip that would not have been out of place in the paper.
• There is an instinct when using Peanuts for advertising purposes to make everything upbeat, but the Ford Falcon strips are actually often darker than the newspaper strip was.
• If you look at the center strip on page 52, you can see that the second and third panels use the exact same art. If you happen to have Chip Kidd’s book Only What’s Necessary, he has a photo of the original art for that strip (I can’t tell you on what page, because Kidd skipped numbering the pages.) They used to be separate drawings, but the entire thing was reworded, and the new versions needed Linus to keep talking to Charlie Brown in panel three, rather than talking to Sally. (This sort of change is not common to all of these strips; the first strip on page 45 is also in the Kidd book, and not a word was changed from the original art.)
• We had thought that this book would be the first time the Christmas strip from Better Homes and Gardens (page 68) would appear in a book… but the book A Charlie Brown Religion, which came out while we were working on this, beat me to it. (I’ve always kicked myself for not including that strip in Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking.)
• The Complete Peanuts format was well designed for what it was designed to do: reprint daily and Sunday newspaper strips. If this book hadn’t been part of the Complete Peanuts series, it probably would have been a more vertically-oriented book. As it is, Seth did a good job fitting things in (even if he had to turn a few items on their sides.) And I really like his use of the second color on the storybook pages.
• Many things were rearranged to fit the format. For example, The Things I Learned books had the text on the left-hand page, the picture on the right.
• Page 237 introduces two factual errors, one of which was my fault. Explaining that “the material you see here” had appeared in Snoopy’s Grand Slam was meant for where I had intended that paragraph to go, which was with the material starting on page 260. However, while the Grand Slam material (like most of the material in the Golf section) had appeared in programs for Bing Crosby’s golf tournament, it had (unlike the rest of the material) not originally appeared there. It had apparently appeared in an issue of Sports Illustrated (which I have not yet tracked down) and was reprinted in the golf program.
• The pictures in the Spot Drawings section come from a range of sources, including the Women’s Sport Foundation Cookbook, the Billie Jean King book Tennis Love, programs for events at Schulz’s skating rink, the book Happy Birthday, Charlie Brown, and a few where I’m not even sure where they were used.
• The spot illos that run with Jean Schulz’s afterword were all from the 1970 book Charlie Brown & Charlie Schulz, where Schulz had illustrated the story of his own life using Chuck as his stand-in.
• Be sure you don’t miss the back cover, where there’s a strip that had only ever appeared before in an issue of Look magazine… where it was reproduced particularly badly. It’s a long strip (longer than a Sunday strip), and while it’s not the funniest of strips, it seems to have been designed to introduce the Look reader to the Peanuts cast, in most case showing off their prime characteristics. Patty, Violet, and Lucy are being nasty to Charlie Brown, Snoopy gets to be dog-like, Linus carries his blanket. If only Schroeder’s ice cream cone had been a scoop of Beethoven, everything would have been perfect!

I am not in any way an unbiased observer of this book. However, I don’t think that one needs to know me that well to realize that I’m being truthful here: even if I had not been involved in this book, I would be very excited to have gotten my hands on it. Even with my huge Peanuts book collection, there is a lot of real Schulz Peanuts stuff in here that has never been in a book before. I’m proud of my part in making it happen, and I hope that you like the book.

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