A year and a half back, I posted a review of Charlie and Friends in Tip Top Comics – The Full Series Reader Collection, a print-on-demand reprint of much the same material as in Peanuts Dell Archive, only without the license for using the Peanuts name. I found, unsurprisingly, that the licensed book actually gave you much better bang for your buck.

But for years, I’ve been repeatedly asked if and when there would be a second volume in the Peanuts Dell Archive series, as the first one had only reprinted about half of the material that was published by Dell and Gold Key. So far, I’ve heard no word on a sequel to that now-out-of-print (although still available as an ebook) volume. But the folks at Gwandanaland who published that earlier Charlie and Friends volume have now moved into that void, with Charlie And Friends – The Dell Series: Volume 1, a reprint of the first six Peanuts issues published by Dell. (For those into comics-collecting details, that would be Four Color issues 878, 969, and 1015, plus Peanuts issues 4 through 6). That’s less than half of the not-yet-reprinted material, but still a reasonable chunk of Peanuts comics. Looking even just at the preview pages on the Amazon listing, it’s clear that very little effort has gone into this volume — forget trying to adjust colors to make up for paper aging and the like, one of the first pages has a hand-written note in the margins, apparently a price once put on whatever copy was scanned for producing this book.

So, it’s a sloppy, lazy job on it… but if you want this material in print otherwise at this point, you’d have to purchase the original issues, which ain’t easy to find cheap. That 1.00 was a bargain for somebody!

I can’t really review this book, as I’ve not decided to purchase a copy yet. If you want to buy one, you have another decision to make, as there are four versions of the book available:

• Charlie And Friends – The Dell Series: Volume 1: Gwandanaland Comics #2665, a paperback with color printing. $38.99
• Charlie And Friends – The Dell Series: Volume 1 Readers Collection: Gwandanaland Comics #2665-A, a black-and-white paperback, $17.99
• Charlie And Friends – The Dell Series: Volume 1: Gwandanaland Comics #2665-HC. a color hardcover, $49.99
• Charlie And Friends – The Dell Series: Volume 1 Readers Collection: Gwandanaland Comics #2665-HCBW, a black-and-white hardcover edition,

(And lest anyone start to come at me for linking to pirated goods — these are not, to the best of my not-a-lawyerly-understanding, pirated. My (again, non-lawyerly) research indicates that US copyright was not maintained on these stories, which puts them in the public domain in the US and some other locales. Indeed, were I not worried about maintaining good relationships with the various official Peanuts people, I might well have produced such a book long since myself!)

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