Sometimes my reviews come with a caveat. In this case, it comes with a whole pile of them.

1. I am not utterly independent on this book, as I actually provided a very small amount of help on it, when I was asked for some input on the bibliography in the back of the book. My name actually pops up in the “special thanks” (as well as a couple places on the bibliography, where books I worked on are being cited. No, I did not recommend their inclusion on the list.) That may taint my view.
2. The author, Mark Evanier, and I have been on friendly terms for a long time. We used to have lunch from time to time, back when I lived a little closer and we were both younger than we are now. Beyond that, I have a business relationship with him. I have published his work multiple times, most recently with a paperback collection of a comic book series he wrote, Hollywood Superstars.
3. This is much the sort of book that I’ve been hired to write in the past, so it’s possible I bear some deep inner jealousy over not being asked to write it. It’s not, however, a surprise that I wasn’t; the world does not lack for books of my writing about Peanuts history, and Evanier (who has written other books previously for this publisher, with whom I’ve no experience) is a fine choice.
4. I have been provided with a free copy of the book. (Usually when I say this, it’s the publisher providing a copy intended for review. In this case, it was actually the Schulz studio providing it primarily as a thanks for the small amount of help that I provided.)
5. And the sort of legal caveat I need to provide from time to time: the book links in this blog post are to Amazon, who give me money for sales generated by people following those links.

The Essential Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time falls into a category of books that I’ll call Big Books About Peanuts, or BBAP for short.  A fair number of BBAPs exist, and they tend to pop up around Peanuts anniversaries. They fall into two subcategories: books that tell the history of Peanuts, though they may have a few strips peppered in, and books that focus on reprinting strips selected as highlights, though they may have some history peppered in. The Essential Peanuts tried to thread the needle between those two types of BBAPs, with roughly equal weight given to the history and the strip reprints.

The strip reprints are what give the book the “Essential” part of its name. Mark and a team of Peanuts folks tried to pick 75 strips that would show the essence of Peanuts. Now obviously, ask any Peanuts knowledgable person to make such a selection, they will come up with a different list… and indeed, if you asked the same person to make a list on two different days, they’ll make two different lists, and all will be legitimate. Having said that, I think that the group did a fine job here with the selections, making both some obvious choices (say, the first appearance of Peppermint Patty) and some non-obvious ones that effectively show what the strip is like. And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that there are just 75 strips in the book, because for most of the essential strips, they show additional strips that expand on the same topic. Sometimes it’s just an additional strip or two, sometimes it’s more, like running the whole Mr. Sack storyline. They were not so locked into a format that they couldn’t flex wisely.

The essential Sunday strips are in color, and the essential daily strips are shown in black-and-white… but any additional strips are shown in color. This seems a reasonable compromise between the purity of showing the strips as Schulz originally intended them and the commercial advantage of color.

Evanier was allowed to write the text from a first-person point of view, so he can talk about, for example, his chatting with Schulz at the cartoonist’s sole appearance a the San Diego Comic-Con. It also means he spends a bit more time on things that he himself is linked to than other writers might have. He does keep circling back to Comic-Con, which is a relatively small thing in the Schulz history but looms large in the Evanier-and-Schulz history (Mark, who has probably hosted more panels at Comic-Con than any two other people combined, is not only one of the few remaining people who has attended ever year of Comic-Con, he has been there for every day of every year of that show since it started in 1970.) There is maybe a little more Lee Mendelson than there might usually be in here; Mark worked extensively with Lee, primarily writing the TV series Garfield and Friends, which Lee executive produced for much of its run. And the one little bit about Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly (and if you haven’t discovered Pogo yet, do give it a try, it’s special stuff) was longer than it might have been in other hands, as Mark has long been involved in managing Kelly’s legacy. Evanier is good at writing about pop culture from his perspective and direct experience (it’s worth checking out his blog at newsfromme.com.)

One thing about Peanuts history is that there’s not a lot of fresh history to be had. While there is certainly still Peanuts news, about new animated specials and the like, there has been enough attention paid to the history of Peanuts that it’s all pretty well mined. And in telling the history of Peanuts, there are clear key points that you have to cover. You have to talk about such things as how executives had low expectations for A Charlie Brown Christmas only to be blown away by it’s success, how Charlie Brown’s longing for the Little Red-Haired Girl reflected a failed Schulz romance, and so forth. The book does find a few new things along the way — I was glad to see Paige Braddock talking about how the lettering was being handled toward the end of the strip — and certainly a fair number of minor points not specifically covered elsewhere. Still, if you’ve read a bunch of Peanuts histories before, don’t expect this one to be a vast revelation.

That brings be to my main recommendation: this is a good, solid BBAP, well written and well designed. If you want to have a BBAP, get it. If you want to give someone a big ol’ Peanutsy gift for Christmas, this would certainly make a good choice. But if you’ve already got a reasonable Peanuts book collection including a couple previous histories, and you were to ask me “do I need this book”, well, no, you do not. In addition to Evanier’s writings, there are a number of pages by other writers with some relevant Peanuts involvement, but many (not all) are the same people we’ve seen write about Peanuts before or appear on Peanuts documentaries. Scattered through the essential strips are quotes from Schulz, but also quotes from various famous people about Peanuts… with most of those simply being culled from the introductions to the Complete Peanuts series. As such, you may find much of this book familiar.

Also included in the slipcase that carried the book is a folder full of goodies. There’s a pack of stickers, a pack of prints of images from an early Peanuts promotion, a pack of postcards of character images taken from the strip, and an Apollo Launch Team patch with a picture of Astronaut Snoopy. My favorite piece in here is a Peanuts comic book, a reproduction of Four Color issue 969, which was also reprinted in 1963 by Gold Key as Peanuts issue 2. This was a great issue to reprint, because (despite what you’ll find in small print in the copyright information), much of this issue was drawn by Schulz himself. While these stories were included (in black and white) in the final volume of The Complete Peanuts, here you get them as they were mean to be seen, in color, in a comic book. It feels right.

The Essential Peanuts is available for immediate shipping from Amazon.

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