The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: Vol. 4 Paperback Edition

The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958: Vol. 4 Paperback Edition

In this paperback reprint of our NYT Best-Selling series, Linus has a “lost weekend” without his blanket. In this fourth paperback volume, the 1950s close down and Peanuts enters its golden age. Linus, who had just learned to speak in the previous volume, becomes downright eloquent and even begins to fend off Lucy’s bullying; even so, his neurosis becomes more pronounced, including a harrowing two-week “Lost Weekend” sequence of blanketlessness. Charlie Brown cascades further down the hill to loserdom, with spectacularly lost kites, humiliating baseball losses (including one where he becomes “the Goat” and is driven from the field in a chorus of BAAAAHs); at least his newly acquired “pencil pal” affords him some comfort. But the rising star is undoubtedly Snoopy. He’s at the center of the most graphically dynamic and action-packed episodes (the ones in which he attempts to grab Linus’s blanket at a dead run), and even tentatively tries to sleep on the crest of his doghouse roof once or twice, with mixed results. Black & white illustrations throughout Charles M. Schulz  was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip  Barney Google ). His ambition from a young age was to be a cartoonist and his first success was selling 17 cartoons to the  Saturday Evening Post  between 1948 and 1950. He also sold a weekly comic feature called  Li'l Folks  to the local  St. Paul Pioneer Press . After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit. He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates and in the spring of 1950, United Feature Syndicate expressed interest in  Li'l Folks . They bought the strip, renaming it Peanuts , a title Schulz always loathed. The first  Peanuts  daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952. Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day-and the day before his last strip was published, having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand ― an unmatched achievement in comics.