So I received the Game Day Peanuts boxed set today (well, I received it yesterday and then let the cardboard box sit untouched for a day. Have you folks heard about this coronavirus thing that’s going around? No, really, you should look it up!) This is the Costco exclusive that I posted about a little while back, with four paperback strip collections focused on various sports. The box has a $64.99 cover price, which I don’t know whether it’s there simply intending to make the Costco price look like a bargain or if the Costco exclusivity is only for a limited time. The individual books do not carry prices or UPC codes, and are not intended for separate sale.

The strip presentation is straightforward, with either two dailies or one Sunday on each 7″x10″ page, in black and white. The strips are run largely in order of appearance (I didn’t verify, but it looked to me like the dailies were all in order and the Sundays were all in order but were not necessarily interspersed so that they were in order with the dailies), and they cover basically the entire run of the strip.

Sports were not all treated evenly in Peanuts, and it shows; the book that’s just baseball strips has more pages than the book that’s got Tennis & Golf and the Hockey & Ice Skating books combined. (The remaining books if Football & Basketball, so you get a lot of pull-the-football-away strips in a short period.)

It took me a while to figure out why this exists: it’s gotta be a Father’s Day present for your sports-lovin’ daddy, right?

With around 800 pages, there should be the equivalent of about 4 years of Peanuts, or about the same amount as is in a Complete Peanuts box set. So this makes a fair substitute for someone with a special interest in sports. It’s a philosophical question whether you want all your Peanuts in themed groups, or whether there is more joy from the chaos (and arguably the lack of immediate repetition) in seeing the various topics interspersed.

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