The latest in the AMP series of strip collections for kids, Snoopy to the Rescue!, is not a Snoopy-specific collection, but rather a collection of circa-1969 strips, ones that were fairly recently reprinted in the papers. It keeps most of the features of the previous AMP collections – everything’s in color, in the back there are articles and activities (this time, on the Peanuts/NASA connection), and there’s a fold-out poster of the book’s cover in the back. One thing that’s been dropped from the format is the flip-book aspect; earlier volumes had little animations at the edges of the pages, so you could riffle the page ends and watch some motion. I think it’s just as well that those are gone. I hope that in later volumes, they take advantage of their absence to move the strips a little more toward the outside edge of the page, so less of the art is sloping into toward the binding.

As for how good it is, hey, it’s late-1960s Peanuts strips. That’s good stuff! If this was for me, I’d prefer that the daily strips were in black-and-white, but these are aimed at a younger audience, who have never seen a black-and-white anything in their lives.

It does give me a chance to fall into my teacher-of-comics tendencies, however. Looking closely at my copies, some of the items (particularly those in red) have white halos around the black lines. Now, there are a couple of reasons why that might be – it’s probable that the red printing was just a little bit out of line, but it may be that the area was not properly filled in… but really proper color handling would have avoided it. When you have black lines around a red area, you want to actually overlap the red and black printing so slightly out-of-alignment printing doesn’t leave unintended white areas. And that’s the coloring lesson for today!

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