Foreword by Diana Krall

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1961-1962

I was a little girl when I discovered Peanuts. One of my earliest memories is of my Dad drawing “Snoopy” on my T-shirt in indelible ink. My favorite uniform when I was around 4 years old was a Charlie Brown sweatshirt; there’s a picture somewhere at my Dad’s. It wasn’t all glamour.

I suppose I related to Charlie Brown. The expression “I got a rock” is part of my language as an adult — not that I’m cynical. I think the first time I heard little kids, or anyone for that matter, use words like “sarcasm,” “cynical,” and “depressed” was in the world of Charlie Brown, a world where the kids were smart and the adults were merely blah blah bla blah blah. “Please put 5 cents in the can,” for when the psychiatrist Lucy was in to discuss your problems, still exists in my language — although the price has gone up slightly now. Read more…

Foreword by Russell T. Davies

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960

I can remember the first time I was ever truly, profoundly, morally shocked. My sister was mocking my Peanuts collection; she said she’d been to a party the night before, and there was a poster on the wall, with Lucy, Patty and Violet, all pregnant, pointing at the round-headed kid and saying “You’ve done it again, Charlie Brown!”

Okay, not a bad life, if that was my greatest shock at ten years old. But that’s how much I loved this stuff. I was a great collector, as a kid. In fact, I was a completist. My specific targets were Doctor Who, Asterix and Charles M. Schulz. For a good five or six years, I’d go into Swansea city centre, every Saturday morning, and rifle through the books in John Menzies, determined to find every single one of those old Hodder & Stoughton Peanuts paperbacks. Number 18 always eluded me – it sounds so daft now, a missing paperback. So small a thing. But not when you’re young – this was huge, this was important, this was my quest! And then my mother went on a weekend trip to Glasgow, and came back, holding the mighty 18 aloft. It came wrapped in a white paper bag. I took it out; read it without daring to bend the spine; then slid it into place, on the bookshelf, between numbers 17 and 19, finally knowing the satisfaction of a collection complete.

I bet my sister’s still laughing. Read more…

Foreword by Jonathan Franzen

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958

Was Charles Schulz‘s comic genius the product of his psychic wounds? Certainly the Schulz depicted in Rheta Grimsley Johnson‘s authorized biography, Good Grief (1989), was a mass of resentments and phobias that seemed attributable, in turn, to emotional traumas in his youth: his unpopularity at school, his skinniness and pimples, the rejection of his drawings by his high school year book, the death of his mother on the eve of his inudction into the army, the little red-haird girl’s rejection of his marriage proposal, and so on. The man who became the best-loved artist on the planet was increasingly prone to attacks of depression and bitter loneliness. (“Just the mention of a hotel makes me turn cold,” he told Grimsley.) Although he left his native Minnesota, he replicated its comforts in California, building himself an ice rink whose snack bar was called “The Warm Puppy.” By the 1970s, he was reluctant even to get on an airplane unless someone from his family was with him. Here — the armchair psychologist might think — was a classic instance of the pathology that produces great art: wounded by adolescent traumas, our hero took permanent refuge in the childhood world of Peanuts. Read more…

Foreword by Matt Groening

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956

Certainly anyone who glances at the rambling little preamble doesn’t actually need any formal introduction to Peanuts.

From our infancies we’ve had our chins wiped with official Snoopy bibs and been swaddled in unofficial security blankets. Over the decades we’ve bohght, received, worn, played with, and stared at an endless series of Peanuts books, greeting cards, sweatshirts, showstrings, coin banks, figurines, advertisements, and TV shows. (Lest you think this is a knock, just remembers I’m the Simpsons guy, and we’ve allowed Bart Simpson asthma inhaler holders and Duff Beer fishing lures.

But clear away the insurance commercials, billboards, dolls, apprel, stickers, soap dishes, and all the rest, and we’re left with the real thing: the Peanuts comic strip itself, Charles Schulz‘s brilliant, angst-ridden, truly funny, fifty-year-long masterpiece of joy and heartbreak. Read more…

Foreword by Walter Cronkite

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1953-1954

Peanuts has caused me almost as much anguish as has been suffered, through vast disappointment or the dastardly doings of fate, by so many of Charles Schulz‘s wondrous characters.

The first of my tales of woe concerns a planned visit with Mr. Schulz in his Santa Rosa home, as arranged by a good friend of his, the noted California newspaper editor and columnist, Neil Morgan. A day in July was set. My anticipation began to grow, like that of a teenager about to meet a rock star. At almost the last moment, a news assignment took me to another corner of the globe. An understanding Schulz agreed to postpone the meeting to another date when I was back in the States. Read more…

Introduction by Garrison Keillor

Extracted from The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952

Sparky Schulz (b. 11/26/22) was a shy, self-conscious kid with bad skin, too light to play football, not tall enough for basketball, the only child of Carl and Dena Schulz of St. Paul, a painful student at St. Paul Central High School, failing at everything, wanting to talk to girls and not knowing how, tormented by teachers and other bullies, finding solace at the movies, sitting in the lovely dark and watching Victor McLaglen in Lost Patrol and Gary Cooper in Beau Geste and Laurel and Hardy and Tarzan, and reading the funny papers, Popeye and Captain Easy and Wash Tubbs. Hundreds of other St. Paul boys were in the same boat, whether Sparky knew it or not, and negotiated the white waters of adolescence and came out into the calm pond of Actuarial or Home Loands or Homiletics, but Sparky had a good hand for drawing with a pencil, at least compared to other kids at Central High he did, and when his mom saw an ad for a University of Minnesota extension class in cartooning, he enrolled in it, and that, as they say, was that. Read more…