Slide, Charlie Brown! Slide!

Peanuts Coronet #10

by Charles M. Schulz

Fawcett Crest D1197 paperback, vg+ In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Comics, Humor, Cartoon, Comic Strips, Childrens, Graphic Novels, Fiction

128 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Charles Monroe Schulz was an American cartoonist, whose comic strip Peanuts proved one of the most popular and influential in the history of the medium, and is still widely reprinted on a daily basis.
Schulz's first regular cartoons, Li'l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to The Saturday Evening Post; the first of 17 single-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li'l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li'l Folks was dropped from the Pioneer Press in January, 1950.
Later that year, Schulz approached the United Feature Syndicate with his best strips from Li'l Folks, and Peanuts made its first appearance on October 2, 1950. The strip became one of the most popular comic strips of all time. He also had a short-lived sports-oriented comic strip called It's Only a Game (1957–1959), but he abandoned it due to the demands of the successful Peanuts. From 1956 to 1965 he contributed a single-panel strip ("Young Pillars") featuring teenagers to Youth, a publication associated with the Church of God.
Peanuts ran for nearly 50 years, almost without interruption; during the life of the strip, Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997. At its peak, Peanuts appeared in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. Schulz stated that his routine every morning consisted of eating a jelly donut and sitting down to write the day's strip. After coming up with an idea (which he said could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours), he began drawing it, which took about an hour for dailies and three hours for Sunday strips. He stubbornly refused to hire an inker or letterer, saying that "it would be equivalent to a golfer hiring a man to make his putts for him." In November 1999 Schulz suffered a stroke, and later it was discovered that he had colon cancer that had metastasized. Because of the chemotherapy and the fact he could not read or see clearly, he announced his retirement on December 14, 1999.
Schulz often touched on religious themes in his work, including the classic television cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), which features the character Linus van Pelt quoting the King James Version of the Bible Luke 2:8-14 to explain "what Christmas is all about." In personal interviews Schulz mentioned that Linus represented his spiritual side. Schulz, reared in the Lutheran faith, had been active in the Church of God as a young adult and then later taught Sunday school at a United Methodist Church. In the 1960s, Robert L. Short interpreted certain themes and conversations in Peanuts as being consistent with parts of Christian theology, and used them as illustrations during his lectures about the gospel, as he explained in his bestselling paperback book, The Gospel According to Peanuts, the first of several books he wrote on religion and Peanuts, and other popular culture items. From the late 1980s, however, Schulz described himself in interviews as a "secular humanist": “I do not go to church anymore... I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in.”

Reviews

[Fr. Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been nostalgic lately, and that means going back to anything related to childhood and revisiting. This book is from the early years of Peanuts, several years before I was born. I have to say, when I was a kid I definitely didn't get the humor of this strip. I loved the cartoons more than the books, and was happy with Snoopy toys and stuffed animals. Now I'm seeing a very sly hand at work, sometimes wry, sometimes absurd, always welcome.

[Carol Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Why? Why? Why? Why?"

"Charlie Brown, I've been asked to tell you that your cries of anguish are keeping the whole neighborhood awake."

[Alex Sarll]

When I was a kid, these little paperbacks were the default way of reading Peanuts (we did have one hardback album too, but that was definitely fancy). Couldn't for the life of you tell you which ones, but I know I liked them. Well, having been plunged back into them after winning this one*, either my tastes have changed more than I thought in the past 35 years, or this is from an off stretch of the strip. It gave me a jolt when, out of all those decades of Peanuts, its opening strip was the exact one I'd recently heard referenced in a radio show about maverick ad-man and environmentalist Howard Gossage, and later on there's what looks a lot like the beginning of the idea which years later would become Woodstock. But in between...yeah, part of it is that I've been spoiled by reading strip cartoons in posh archival editions that explain the outdated topical references, so that now I stumble over a punchline baldly expecting me to know who Sam Snead is, when as a child the confusion was only to be expected. But even beyond Mr Snead, dear heavens there's a lot of sport in this one, and the only thing worse than actual sports is American sports. Jokes drag on a day or two too long. Charlie Brown too often tips over from sympathetic everyman into Peter Parker-style permaschmuck, and some of the other kids, especially Lucy, are outright psychotic. Ah well; maybe they always were, and it just didn't register at the time because I was constantly surrounded by tiny psychos myself. If nothing else, growing up has at least that to recommend it.

*For the best music festival line-up with no music, and if I'm honest the adjudicators were being much too kind given some of the competition.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simply a pocket sized escape from the world. To rate anything charles schulz does below 5 stars is a crime of the heart. The humor is simplistic of course, but also sharp that very few gifted people can pull off.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume contains the series in which Linus receives his first library card, making him a "citizen of the world of knowledge."

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a 1979 printing of this collection. It contains cartoons from the early 1960s. I sometimes wonder about the editing of these collections, it does seem rather random. The series concerning Snoopy’s kennel being threatened by the building of a new freeway doesn’t reach a conclusion. Wasn’t there a conclusion or did the editor of this volume just omit it? Hard to tell. The cartoons themselves are as ever a joy to read and reread.

[Noninuna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peanuts is still one of my pick-me-up.

[Heidi · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Vincent Darkhelm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant as always.

[Narariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a pretty good "classic Charlie Brown." Focusing mostly on Charlie's baseball adventures, the book contains selected cartoons from the early 1950s, I believe. Linus has some encounters with his blanky-hating grandma & he gets a library card. The library series is actually one of my favorites in the book, sweet & funny.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What else was there in grade school?

[Rick Bavera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Peanuts always it a good dose of humor to add to your reading and your day.

You cannot go wrong with these collections of Peanuts, or reading the "reruns" in the daily paper.