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Peanuts Titan Comics Editions #4
Good Ol' Charlie Brown
THE FOURTH VOLUME IN THE CLASSIC CHARLES SCHULTZ PEANUTS COLLECTION!
PEANUTS and its creator, Charles M. Schulz are arguably the world's most famous newspaper comic strip and cartoonist in history. The Peanuts cartoon strip holds the distinction of being the world's longest continuing story, running for a staggering 17,897 strips from October 1950 to February 2000.
Peanuts tells the story of meek, nervous Charlie Brown (a boy incapable of flying a kite, hitting a baseball or kicking a football), his dog - Snoopy and his group of childhood friends as they tackle the complexities of modern life: friendships, crushes, first loves, siblings and kicking a touchdown.
This collection of 248 daily Peanuts newspaper strips that appeared between 1955 -1957 features all your favourite characters, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Violet, Patty, Shermy, Lucy, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Linus and Beethoven.
The strip's bitter-sweet humour and child-like innocence helped to cement the Peanuts comic strip's popularity and secure its reputation as a true, one-of-a-kind, timeless classic.
This book is a facsimile edition of the fourth Peanuts collection originally published back in 1957 by the Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd of Toronto, Canada.
PEANUTS and its creator, Charles M. Schulz are arguably the world's most famous newspaper comic strip and cartoonist in history. The Peanuts cartoon strip holds the distinction of being the world's longest continuing story, running for a staggering 17,897 strips from October 1950 to February 2000.
Peanuts tells the story of meek, nervous Charlie Brown (a boy incapable of flying a kite, hitting a baseball or kicking a football), his dog - Snoopy and his group of childhood friends as they tackle the complexities of modern life: friendships, crushes, first loves, siblings and kicking a touchdown.
This collection of 248 daily Peanuts newspaper strips that appeared between 1955 -1957 features all your favourite characters, including Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Violet, Patty, Shermy, Lucy, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Linus and Beethoven.
The strip's bitter-sweet humour and child-like innocence helped to cement the Peanuts comic strip's popularity and secure its reputation as a true, one-of-a-kind, timeless classic.
This book is a facsimile edition of the fourth Peanuts collection originally published back in 1957 by the Clarke, Irwin & Company, Ltd of Toronto, Canada.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1957
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173 people want to read
About the author
Charles M. Schulz
3,032 books1,638 followersCharles 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.”
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.”
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
December 9, 2015
One of my favorite childhood memories
Was buying cheap Peanuts books and reading them over and over. This collection was like reuniting with an old friend.
Was buying cheap Peanuts books and reading them over and over. This collection was like reuniting with an old friend.
December 30, 2016
Amusing, but perhaps less funny and meaningful than other similar comic strips.
Holiday Booktubeathon #2 complete!
Holiday Booktubeathon #2 complete!
April 29, 2021
Some of the stories made me laugh. Some did not, hence a four-star rating instead of five. Definitely would read more of Peanuts if I could get my hands on them though! They're pretty timeless.
Read
May 11, 2023I don't know where I got this collection. I think a friend of my parents once asked me to come and help clear out a dead relative's attic and I found a couple Peanuts collections there. I was allowed to keep them.
But rereading this collection doesn't bring up those memories, but rather those of staying after school while my mother, a teacher, prepared her lesson plans for the next day. I sat alone in the school library and consumed Peanuts collections as easily as breathing. I recall reading many of the strips in this book back then, sitting on that grey carpet behind low wooden bookshelves, the grey light of a cloudy afternoon coming in the tall windows.
I can't rate this book. Some of it is funny, some of it is not, all of it is infused with the precocious voice that made Peanuts so revolutionary (and today, in a post "Calvin & Hobbes" world, seems almost quaint). All of it is drawn well for its style. (I kind of prefer this middle-era Peanuts look.) But any objectivity I might have about the book is overshadowed by the memories of first reading these books as a kid and just wondering at the world Schulz spun with his pen.
But rereading this collection doesn't bring up those memories, but rather those of staying after school while my mother, a teacher, prepared her lesson plans for the next day. I sat alone in the school library and consumed Peanuts collections as easily as breathing. I recall reading many of the strips in this book back then, sitting on that grey carpet behind low wooden bookshelves, the grey light of a cloudy afternoon coming in the tall windows.
I can't rate this book. Some of it is funny, some of it is not, all of it is infused with the precocious voice that made Peanuts so revolutionary (and today, in a post "Calvin & Hobbes" world, seems almost quaint). All of it is drawn well for its style. (I kind of prefer this middle-era Peanuts look.) But any objectivity I might have about the book is overshadowed by the memories of first reading these books as a kid and just wondering at the world Schulz spun with his pen.
May 22, 2010
While working to perfect my technique in imitating Charles Schulz I was rather dismayed to see how the characters evolved over the years. For one thing, there were more of them. Peppermint Patty and the other newcomers seemed heretical to me. For another thing, Schulz' own technique improved. The older strips, such as those in this unpaginated volume, were more primitive, the characters having less character. I was unable to reconcile the contradiction between preferring the more recent art yet eschewing the more recent characters. Interestingly, the emotions in play were not too dissimilar from those obtaining while performing textual exegeses many, many years later.
February 3, 2020
A lot of focus on Schroeder and his love of Beethoven in this book. I had fun with the Pig Pen stories explaining his love of dirt and how he is unable to stay clean doing ANY activity (or non-activity). Really struck by how mean the girls in this book are. The current generation would call them bullies (which they are) but they wouldn't be able to put up with and persevere like Charlie Brown does. Its so interesting to me how I consider the Peanuts gang to be so wholesome and family friendly, but the current state of things would find them aggressive, solipcistic, and condescending.
May 1, 2014
I'm sure my rating would have been higher back in the day but I'm sick of seeing Charlie Brown re-runs in the funny pages. Enough! I read most if not all of the compilations back in the day but this one can stand for all of them.
June 25, 2020
Read or reread or even Re-reread the original comic strips of Charles Schulz' Peanuts and good old Charlie Brown gets gooder and older every time, and so does his friends. This collection has some of the best strips from the late 50s and early 60s, where Schulz' kid characters get richer in dimension. Schroeder learns that his all time composer hero Ludwig van Beethoven is having a memorial at the Rhine, and the cost in American dollars comes to ten mill. "Spare no expense!" he shouts, and then attempts to fund raise for his hero, a concerto of good intentions doomed to failure in A Flat! Pig Pen is hard core when it comes to being dirty: not only does he resemble your remarks, he'll take personal defense of it! "I did hear," says Pig Pen "that cleanliness is next to Godliness, but with me cleanliness is next to impossible!" Damn right! And we kinda figure out why Charlie is down on himself: Patty and Violet, the ambiguously lezzie duo before there was a Peppermint Patty and Marcie, just love to rub it in: "We're inviting everyone to our party, just NOT YOU, CHARLIE BROWN!" It's good grief where the grief is real good, and the offbeat, realistic humor is even better. Check it out on Internet library. Peanuts make ordinary occasions special!
Four stars
Charlie Brown is the good that never gets old!
Four stars
Charlie Brown is the good that never gets old!
May 14, 2022
Mi padre leía pocos tebeos, pero de los peanuts tenía por lo menos quince libros en sus estanterías. En el proceso natural de absorción y descarte de las estanterías de mi padre descubrí a Charlie Brown, el antihéroe, y a Snoopy y a Woodstock, héroes peculiares, y a Linus y su manta, y a Schroeder y su piano, y a Lucy, enamorada de Schroeder, y a Patty y a Sally, y a todos los demás. De trazo simple, con líneas argumentales que oscilaban entre una y doscientas tiras, Charles Schulz creó durante 50 años (solo Ibáñez ha sido más prolífico durante más tiempo) un pequeño universo al que he vuelto alguna vez, para comprobar con gusto que, si bien ya no me llama como antes, no ha envejecido mal.
Hay tantas tiras (más de 18.000 en 50 años, se dice pronto) que, como dicen de los Simpson, toda cosa que pase ha salido ya probablemente en una tira de Charlie Brown. Las leí sobre todo entre mis 10 y mis 15 años, pero cuando me he cruzado con alguna en años posteriores ha seguido aguantando el tipo y, por supuesto, se aprecian má mensajes destinados al adulto. La maravilla de las cosas bien hechas, que apelan a todos los públicos. Altamente recomendable.
Hay tantas tiras (más de 18.000 en 50 años, se dice pronto) que, como dicen de los Simpson, toda cosa que pase ha salido ya probablemente en una tira de Charlie Brown. Las leí sobre todo entre mis 10 y mis 15 años, pero cuando me he cruzado con alguna en años posteriores ha seguido aguantando el tipo y, por supuesto, se aprecian má mensajes destinados al adulto. La maravilla de las cosas bien hechas, que apelan a todos los públicos. Altamente recomendable.
May 30, 2020
I would call it a work of literary genius. But that would be condescending.
December 22, 2020
È stato un buon intrattenimento ma in alcune parti l'umorismo utilizzato non l'ho proprio capito.
March 17, 2021
Love Charlie Brown.
October 6, 2021
Rilettura 10 anni dopo, eccezionale come 10 anni fa.
May 11, 2023
Such a cute little book!!
June 22, 2024
I liked it, but it did not feel as sweet or as fresh as the first collection of comic strips. It was more of the same.
February 8, 2025
I love every single character in this and would take a bullet for each of them.
August 28, 2025
Most comics didn't age well. A few were really funny.
April 27, 2025
Timeless, fun and witty.
March 15, 2023
This was one on the many Peanuts books that were in my family's book collection as a child and somehow it has survived in amazing condition. I was born in November of 1956 and this edition was published in January of 1957. I don't know when it came into our house-hold but it is one of my most cherished possessions from my childhood. I do remember looking at the pictures as a child and later on, reading it after I took personal possession of it sometime in the 60's.
March 20, 2011
Quote:
Linus: Sai qual'è un pensiero agghiacciante?
Charlie Brown: No, qual'è?
Linus: Solo un metro quadrato di flanella mi separa da un collasso nervoso!
Linus: Sai qual'è un pensiero agghiacciante?
Charlie Brown: No, qual'è?
Linus: Solo un metro quadrato di flanella mi separa da un collasso nervoso!
May 6, 2011
It's Peanuts. Who doesn't like Peanuts?
September 28, 2015
Charles Schulz was an American classic. It is so enjoyable to go back to these early collection of Peanuts strips.
September 22, 2019
It has been a real pleasure to read these Charlie Brown cartoons. They have taken me, very happily, back to my childhood
April 5, 2017
Outstanding.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews