I recently got the latest two of Fantagraphics small square themed strip reprints, Waiting for the Great Pumpkin and Snoopy’s Thanksgiving. What I find interesting is how different two books designed to be basically the same can be. They both reprint strips in the same format, generally one daily strip on a page. But the strip selection – the Great Pumpkin book focuses solely on reprinting strips from the 1950s and 1960s, with later strips only used for blowing up large for decorative purposes. The Thanksgiving book is made up I believe only of post-1960s strips. The Great Pumpkin book, focused on a particular (great) trope, does get a bit repetitive, as Schulz reintroduced the Great Pumpkin concept each year he used it, while Thanksgiving, not grounded in any specific Schulz invention, has less redundancy (perhaps a bit on the subject of Woodstock surviving the holiday.)

Both are still fairly nice little books. And if you get them, do take off the dust jackets and look at the well-selected images on the “boards”, as they’re called… although the image they chose for the board on the Thanksgiving book is the same one as the front cover of the upcoming Woodstock, Master of Disguise volume.

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