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The Complete Peanuts #5-6

The Complete Peanuts Boxset, 1959-1962

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The popular, annual gift set continues with the fifth and sixth volumes.

Continuing the tradition of the previous two holiday seasons, Fantagraphics presents a deluxe boxed set of the fifth and sixth volumes of The Complete Peanuts, designed by the award-winning graphic novelist Seth. Shipping shrinkwrapped, with Volumes 1959-1960 and 1961-1962 packed in a sturdy custom box designed especially for this set, it's the perfect gift book item of the season.

This set collects almost 1500 daily and Sunday comic strips, the vast majority of which are not currently available in any in-print Peanuts collection, and many of which have never been reprinted since heir initial appearance in papers over 50 years ago. Using archival-quality syndicate proofs for virtually every strip in its history, the series boasts the best-looking, crispest reproduction for a classic comic strip ever achieved.

Peanuts is the most successful comic strip in the history of the medium. A United Media poll in 2002 found Peanuts to be the second most recognizable cartoon property in the world, known by 94 percent of the total U.S. consumer market and a close second only to Mickey Mouse (96 percent).

688 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 2006

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About the author

Charles M. Schulz

3,037 books1,631 followers
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.”

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5 stars
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for James.
127 reviews15 followers
July 27, 2007
The greatest comic strip of all times is being collected in these beautiful editions. Published at a rate of 2 volumes a year, each fall both of the volumes are collected in a beautiful slip-case edition. These are a standing Christmas present from my wife, who didn't quite realize what she was getting into. It's amazing to watch the comic evolve over time, the shapes of the characters, the characters who get dropped, the new (and classic!) characters who get introduced. To my college friends who remember my ambition to reproduce "Hamlet" with the characters from Peanuts, I say my life's work is now possible (in a few years, anyway.)
Profile Image for Rani Wishnu.
15 reviews3 followers
January 25, 2008
A stupid cartoon shows that children life's can also be complicated,even when it only talk about baseball game, lousy team, homework, friends,....

I love peanuts ....charlie n the gang
A great characther combinations of snoopy, charlie, lucy,linus, schoeder and many more..
Profile Image for S.D..
97 reviews
September 4, 2009
Please see my comprehensive review, entered for The Complete Peanuts 1969-1970 (Volume 10)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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