So, today I was supposed to be packing up my office, including boxing up the AAUGH.com reference library, preparing for a move. But with life being hectic, I realized I hadn’t actually read the recently released The Complete Peanuts: 1971-1972, so I reckoned that better than spend hours packing, I better spend hours reading Peanuts strips. Yes, yes, the sacrifices I make!

This is an interesting couple years. Rerun is born, and named, but not actually seen. There’s a surprising amount of stuff about Woodstock and worms. We learn about both “Thompson’s in Trouble” and “Ha, Ha, Herman”, which would put those interesting phrases into the titles of some of hte Holt books. And this is where we get the biggest amount of material about author Helen Sweetstory and her Six Bunny-Wunnies books – the travails of being a fan, the efforts to write a biography (of a particularly young author; if we accept Ms. Sweetstories April 5, 1950 birthdate, she was a mere 21 when the bioraphy was being written), and even the censorship of The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out. Peppermint Patty is in denial of her love for Chuck.

This gave me the impetus to do a little web research into the game “Ha, Ha, Herman”, an odd form of hide-and-seek that they play… and I didn’t find anything. Oh, I found some web references to the Peanuts continuity, and to some other games called Ha, Ha, Herman (apparently named after the game in the Peanuts continuity), but no sign of an actual game that predates the strip. So, was this some minor game that Schulz didn’t realize was minor? Was it something that he invented, and was trying to publicize via the strip (the way that Al Capp purposely tried to create Sadie Hawkins Day in “Li’l Abner”)? Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not something I’ve found in his biographies. And speaking of biographies, Schulz’s own thoughts on biographies seen here might well be applied to some of the writing about Schulz himself:

This is the volume where we learn about the medical journal which said that a person who is deprived of his blanket by a stupid beagle who has it made into a sport coat cannot survive for more than forty-eight hours. And let’s remember, in 1971, the year’s football was pulled away through the courtesy of Women’s Lib! References to The Godfather and American Pie remind you of when these were done (and a reference to Johnny Horizon sent me scrambling to Wikipedia – not all cultural references last!)

The “introduction” by Kristin Chenowith (who won a Tony playing Sally in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown) is actually an interview, which is a letdown. After all, in an introduction, it is incumbent on the writer to find something interesting to say about the material; in an interview, the interviewer merely hopes that the right questions will bring something interesting out. I can’t say this one was fascinating.

The Complete Peanuts: 1971-1972 is now shipping, and of course if you’re the sort of person who is reading this blog, you want it. Or you can preorder this fall’s boxed set of 1971-1974.

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