The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970 will be shipping soon. Should you buy it? Well, yes, of course. If you’re reading the AAUGH Blog, you’re the sort of person who should be buying all these volumes. Why do you even ask me such silly questions?

Having just finished reading through it, I can tell you that the things here which caught my eye include:

• a nice introduction by the talented Mo Willems, explaining why a Peanuts book is better than art
• two strips on the aggressive playing of tetherball and a brief reference to roller derby, neither among the strips more regularly-referenced sports
• raising the question of whether Beethoven was black
• interesting religious and faith references, with individual both questioning whether g-d loves them and facing the question of whether to purposely abandon faith in a belief
• multiple allusions to the then-ongoing conflict in Vietnam, including a reluctance on Linus’s part toward getting drafted
• Snoopy dealing with the Head Beagle, then getting the title himself for a while.
• Joe Shlabotnik being a key advertised guest at a sports banquet, alongside Garagiola, Nicklaus, and Orr. Seems to place Joe above his usual station.
• A couple of Lucy strips that echo a little stronger in these days when the US has a woman running for the second-highest in the land, and had a woman in contention for the highest: her opining that “If everybody agreed with me, they’d all be right”, and Snoopy thinking that he’d vote for her if it wasn’t for one little problem…
• Woodstock finally getting named, on June 22, 1970. a bit short of a year after the music and the mud took over Max Yasgur’s farm… and about 3 months after the release of the film documentary (which, if Schulz experienced Woodstock at all, is likely how he experienced it.)
• Sally asking Charlie Brown “Do you believe in freedom, Big Brother?”, which feels like it should be from a scene in 1984.
• A recurring theme of students writing essays to match what the teacher wants to hear, rather than what they believe. We see this sort of thinking from Linus, Sally, and Peppermint Patty. (This pops up in the fall of 1970, leading in to what seems a more school-oriented decade of strips, although I haven’t done any sort of strip count to check.)

(And if you suspect from that list that I’m particularly interested when I see strips reflecting the culture and the world of the moment when they were created, you’d be right.)

As I said, The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970 will be shipping soon, although it will apparently be shipping first as part of the boxed set of this year’s two volumes. So if you took my advice earlier this year and held off buying 1967-1968 until the boxed set came out, now is the time to place your order!

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