In our latest paperback volume of The Complete Peanuts, love takes many shapes and shades. Charlie Brown's infatuation with the Little Red-Haired Girl is rekindled; Linus fails to impress Lydia; Sally hoorays for Hollywood; Marcie pines for the World War I Flying Ace, who becomes lost in his cups (of root beer); Peppermint Patty and Marcie battle for Charlie Brown's affection; and Snoopy is absolutely obsessed... with cookies. Throughout, Schulz makes Peanut's balancing act of heartbreak and wry humor feel effortless -- in these his strips of the '90s, his cartooning has never looked more confident, and his sense of humor is unrestrained. The Complete Peanuts is the publishing project that launched a renaissance in comic strip publishing and the only place Charles M. Schulz's classic has ever been collected in its entirety. Featuring impeccable production values, each volume of this series features two successive years of newspaper strips (dailies and Sundays), plus bonus material such as celebrity introductions, interviews, and a brief biography of Schulz himself.
Author Biography:
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.
Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) is the creator of This Modern World, a weekly cartoon of political and social satire which is featured on The Nation, Daily Kos, and The Nib, and which has been a mainstay of the alternative press for twenty-five years. His work has also appeared in publications including The New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Mother Jones, US News and World Report, the Economist, and many others. He is a two-time recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the 2013 recipient of the Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning, and a 2015 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New York City.
