I’ve seen a number of sites linking to this review on PopMatters of Celebrating Peanuts, the big thick 60th anniversary strip collection, and it’s an interesting piece, but it makes some arguable arguments and gets a few things wrong… and while I’ve addressed some of that in a comment there, it launches a couple other notes. As I note there, he’s wrong when he states that all of the Sundays in the book are in color. Just eyeballing it, it looks like about half of them are, with more color as the book goes on – unsurprisingly, since eventually you get the period where the strip was colored by computer, for modern-day printing methods, so those color files can be easily reused. But if you look at many of earlier strips, it’s clear that they aren’t using the original coloring. The colors have gradients, where one color fades into another… a modern computer-coloring feature. Now, I’m not complaining on an aesthetic level – as someone who has been experimenting with recoloring things, I’ve often found that a gradient sky (and that’s most of what they use it for, a sky) makes a panel easier on the eye and brings the focus better on the characters in the panel. It’s not like they tried modeling detail on every character, which would be wrong. But from a historic standpoint – the black-and-white versions are what Schulz drew, the versions where they reproduce the original colors present what was shown in the newspapers, but these recolored versions aren’t properly historic, and that may not be the right angle to take in an archival book like this one.

The review also claims that it is an effort to figure out the precise date of the strips in the Complete Peanuts books, which makes me realize that some people have not figured out how to read the date off of a strip. In all but hte first two weeks of Peanuts, you’ll find a number, a dash, then another number written in one of the panels. That’s the month and day-of-the-month of publication. Sometimes the copyright notice is printed too small to see the year in, but in Complete Peanuts, the year is always noted on the bottom of the page.

I think he’s also off in the suggestion that viewing Peanuts as a dark strip is fairly new. There may have been (and continue to be) a perception among people who don’t know Peanuts that it is a happy-slice-of-childhood strip, but any real look at the strip has always described it as dark for at least 40 years now.

Okay, okay, I’m mainly correcting a review of Celebrating Peanuts rather than the book itself… but to justify the headline here, I’ll note that on page 81 of the book, it identifies a strip as being from September 25, 1951 when it’s really from 1957. The strip is in the right place, it’s just a typo in the date. I won’t claim that that’s the only error – I haven’t done a scouring for mistakes as I did for Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz. That’s just one that hits my eye.

But hey, if you like these oversized slipcased hardcovers, and you happen to like Dilbert, then I’ve found a deal for you. Dilbert 2.0, which is an $85 book and includes a DVD-ROM of every strip up until April of 2008, is now available for under $27 (and qualifies for free shipping on its own.)

Oh, and a note to anyone who was interested in the discounted copies of Mouse Guard I mentioned a while back. I have heard from others who note that their copies did not arrive shrink-wrapped as mine was, and thus had a hard-to-remove Amazon bar code sticker right on the book.

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