In all the rush of Valentine’s Day, work, and then illness I completely forgot about the fact that February 12th marked the 5 year anniversary of the passing of Charles M. Schulz, beloved creator of Peanuts. I won’t go into alot of detail on his life. This book does a far better job than I ever could imagine and was lovingly written with the help and permission of Mrs. Schulz after his death.

I grew up as a Peanuts fanatic. I loved to draw when I was young and I was always drawing pictures of Snoopy and Woodstock. My local library had several collections of Peanuts books and I frequently checked them out. For some reason I always got Peanuts, I understood why it was funny and I frequently laughed out loud at some of the strips…I still do actually. I will acknowledge that the later years of Peanuts was pretty dry, but the earlier stuff is so brilliant. Schulz seemed to have the ability to capture the essence of the fears and anxieties of children, and adults for that matter. By making these “funny” he succeeded in showing us that we are not alone with these issues. As I stated before, the earliest of these strips were the best. Fantagraphics Books started an ambitious project last year to put together every Peanuts strip in book format in chronological order. There will be 25 books in all covering 50 years of Peanuts strips. They are releasing 2 books per year. Much of the early stuff has never been collected in book format before. I’ve got the first 2 of these and they are wonderful. Charlie Brown is much more mischievious and sarcastic in these early strips and its so much fun to read the strips where specific characters were introduced for the first time and to think that they had been written years before I was born.

There are very few creators/entertainers who are real class acts and Charles M. Schulz was definitley one of them. Two days before he died I was watching a 60 minutes special about him with my parents and I mentioned that it wouldn’t surprise me if he passed away now that he was giving up something that was his life’s passion. I was very saddened by how prophetic those words were. I feel privileged to have grown up in one of the many generations who got to see Mr. Schulz’s work on a daily basis and I’m happy that Peanuts’ popularity is such that many future generations will be able to grow up with the Peanuts gang.