The complete Peanuts 1973 to 1974

From "The Complete Peanuts: 1973 to 1974," the 12th volume in a series reprinting Charles M. Schulz's comics. AS the modern-day American newspaper comic strip slowly chokes to death, done in by shrinking spaces and exhausted franchises, its more vibrant ancestors are living in renewed luxury. Comic strips are the most ephemeral kind of art; each installment is intended to last only as long as a single day's paper. Now, though, virtually every major American strip of the past century or so is being reprinted in its entirety in handsome, well-designed editions, with better reproduction than it had the first time around. For those of us who grew up with battered copies of "The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics," hoping someday to sneak a look at an older collector's scrapbook of yellowed clippings, the last couple of years have been paradise. This is the first time in decades that nobody needs a microfiche reader to thrill to the dramatic sweep and rugged line of Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates"; to meditate on the feverish, cracked solemnity of George Herriman's final months of "Krazy Kat"; to be taken aback that in the '5Os, Hank Ketcham's "Dennis the Menace" was genuinely funny; to marvel at the brutal grotesquerie and hilarious character design of Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" in its heyday; to discover that Harold Gray's "Little Orphan Annie" was talky, exquisitely rendered and bristlingly conservative (the idea of getting "a New Deal for Christmas," per the Annie musical, would have been anathema to the strip's creator); to find out the hard way that Alex Raymond's postwar photorealist P.I. series, "Rip Kirby," is actually kind of boring. The vintage-comic-strip renaissance has also brought back a lot of charming Oddities. THE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD OF GUSTAVE VERBEEK (Sunday Press, 160) reprints the complete 1903-5 run of "The Upside-Downs of Little Lady Lovekins and Old Man Muffaroo," a Sunday strip whose every episode could be flipped upside down to show the second half of its narrative. That didn't make for great art, but it's a ridiculously clever gimmick. The book is rounded out with selected installments of Verbeek's other strips, including "The Terrors of the Tiny Tads," in which a group of small, scribbly-looking children encounter threatening beasts like the Cariboogaboo, the Backgamonkey and a pair of "militantalizing" suffragists (hey, it was 1914). The flagship of this new wave of reprints, though, is Charles M. Schulz's COMPLETE PEANUTS, collecting the most readable of all the great strips - it's easy to inhale a year's worth in a single sitting. The centerpiece of the 12th and most recent volume, 1973 TO 1974 (Fantagraphics, $28.99), is a sequence in which Charlie Brown, embarrassed by a baseball-patterned rash, goes to summer camp wearing a paper bag over his head, only to face the deeper embarrassment of sudden social acceptance. "Peanuts" always had a bite to it; Schulz's favorite source of comedy was the anxieties and humiliations of childhood. Still, some of these strips are unnervingly bitter even for him, as when Marcie destroys Snoopy's doghouse in a rage, then screams at Peppermint Patty that she needs to "face up to reality." It provokes laughter, of course, but shocked laughter: you can tell these kids aren't going to grow up happy. The design of "The Complete Peanuts," by the Canadian artist Seth - landscape layout, three daily strips or a Sunday strip on each page, two years per volume, covers and endpapers constructed around images from that volume's era - has become the default look for high-class strip reprints. (When even "Hägar the Horrible" is getting the "Peanuts"-lookalike treatment, it's clear that the fashion has gone a little too far, and that maybe so has the archival impulse.) The format has also been applied to Berkeley Breathed's BLOOM COUNTY LIBRARY: Volume One, 1980-1982 [IDW, $39.99), which it doesn't quite fit; there's lots of white space next to the daily strips, some of it filled with annotations explaining that, for instance, Ashley Dashley was a parody of Ted Turner, and that "the Gipper" was Ronald Reagan's nickname. Breathed took a while to get past being a kookier, less assured and less pointed Carry Trudeau; he notes in his annotations that "Doonesbury" was more or less his sole frame of reference when he started "Bloom County," and the earliest strips (augmented by a few excerpts from his undergraduate comic "The Academia Waltz") are clumsy imitations of Trudeau's design and pacing. After the first year or so, Opus the penguin arrives, right around the moment that Breathed eases up on his forced topical satire and begins to discover that his real strengths are whimsy and absurdity. By the end of this volume, "Bloom County," like Opus, is still flightless, but it's got some wings. In "The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek," the narrative continues when the page is rotated 180 degrees. Wimpy, Popeye and the Sea Hag in a 1934 strip, from "Plunder Island." Fortunately, not every strip reprint looks like "The Complete Peanuts." Jacob Covey's design for E. C. Segar's "Popeye" series is appropriately tall, imposing and sturdy, with a big die-cut in the middle of each volume's front cover, as if the sailor man himself had punched somebody through it. PLUNDER ISLAND (Fantagraphics, $29.99), the fourth of six volumes, covers the 1933-35 era of the strip that was officially called "Thimble Theater" but was universally known by the name of the one-eyed pipe-smoking brawler who first showed up 10 years into its run and promptly took over. Segar was a comedian above all - his best supporting player, the hamburger-craving coward J. Wellington Wimpy, gets a lot of mileage out of a few catchphrases. ("Jones is my name," Wimpy bluffs whenever somebody figures out he's at fault. "I'm one of the Jones boys") But the chaos and violence of a sailor's life inspired Segar's most spectacular comedy. Part of each Sunday "Thimble Theater" page here is taken up by an affable, forgettable humor feature called "Sappo," while for seven months the frenetic Popeye adventure alongside it stars that murderous brigand the Sea Hag and her terrifying mute enforcer, Alice the Goon. That 75-year-old sequence is crude, jolting, scary and funny, and there's nothing like it in the beaten-down funny pages of the present. At least it's been rescued from the trash cans of history. Douglas Wolk is the author of "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean." He writes frequently about comics for The Times.

In the introduction to the latest volume of Peanuts in chronology, tennis champ Billie Jean King reminisces about her friendship with Schulz, based on their mutual support of women's athletics which brings to mind the prominence of sports in the beloved strip. Baseball, in particular, is a recurring subject in the strips collected here. In one sequence, Charlie Brown's obsession with the sport even manifests in a baseball rash on the back of his bald head. Snoopy, though largely absent from the diamond, is seen playing tennis, football, golf, and hockey. As always, Schulz's work displays restrained humor, subtle wisdom, and grace notes of melancholy.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2009 Booklist