The Dell Peanuts Archive hits comic shops this Wednesday, and bookstores (including Amazon) not long after that. I’ve got a PDF – really, would’ve had it last week, had I been paying attention – and can give a rundown of what it actually holds. No, it’s not the complete 1950s/1960s Peanuts comics. It is indeed the 352 pages that I discussed earlier, so only about half of the material. It is lead into by an intro from Peanuts specialist Derrick Bang. What it collects is all of the Peanuts stories from comic books that were not made up primarily of Peanuts stories. In other words, it collects the stories from Nancy 146-173, Nancy & Sluggo 174-192 (continuing the same series with a slightly different title; the last few issues were published not by Dell, but by Gold Key), Tip-Top 211-225, and Fritzi Ritz 57-59. So what’s missing? The issues of Peanuts and of Four Color (which would say Peanuts on the cover – Four Color was Dell’s catch-all title for things they wanted to publish that didn’t have their own series.) There’s enough of those for another book about this size, which is mentioned as a possibility but not a done deal in the introduction. This book does include the covers that Schulz did for those books, putting them at the end, which is good because it means that there is Schulz at the very beginning and the very end. The material has artist credits for the other artists where it is known… although some of it isn’t known, and some of the stuff toward the end is rather dire. But hey, you could easily pay the current Amazon price for this for just one of the issues included. For those who care about the comic books, this book is quite a deal.

Below, I’m throwing in as many sample pages as they’ll let me. Click to enlarge.

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