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The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952: Vol. 1 Hardcover Edition Hardcover – May 17, 2004

by Charles M. Schulz (Author), Garrison Keillor (Introduction), Seth (Designer)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,239 ratings
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The first volume in the bestselling archival series collecting the most beloved comic strip ever. Many of these formative strips have never been collected or reprinted anywhere else. Introduction by Garrison Keillor.

This first volume, covering the first two and a quarter years of the strip, will be of particular fascination to Peanuts aficionados worldwide: Although there have been literally hundreds of Peanuts books published, many of the strips from the series' first two or three years have never been collected before―in large part because they showed a young Schulz working out the kinks in his new strip and include some characterizations and designs that are quite different from the cast we're all familiar with. (Among other things, three major cast members―Schroeder, Lucy, and Linus―initially show up as infants and only "grow" into their final "mature" selves as the months go by. Even Snoopy debuts as a puppy!) Thus The Complete Peanuts offers a unique chance to see a master of the art form refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month.

This volume is rounded out with Garrison Keillor's introduction, a biographical essay by David Michaelis (Schulz and Peanuts) and an in-depth interview with Schulz conducted in 1987 by Gary Groth and Rick Marschall, all wrapped in a gorgeous design by award-winning cartoonist Seth. Black-and-white comic strips throughout
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  1. Part of Series
    The Complete Peanuts
  2. Print length
    360 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Fantagraphics
  5. Publication date
    May 17, 2004
  6. Dimensions
    6.8 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    9781560975892
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1560975892
  9. See all details
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From the Publisher

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts books, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Fantagraphics

Fantagraphics' bestselling archival series collecting the most beloved comic strip of all time—The Complete Peanuts, our landmark hardcover series, offers a unique chance to see a master of the art form refine his skills and solidify his universe, day by day, week by week, month by month. Each volume includes two years of daily strips along with featured introductions, our popular Peanuts index, essays, in-depth interviews and more, all wrapped in a gorgeous design by award-winning cartoonist Seth.

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts books, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Fantagraphics

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts books, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Fantagraphics

Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts books, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Fantagraphics

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Good grief! The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 launches the most ambitious and most important project in the comics and cartooning genre: over a period of 12 years, Fantagraphics Books will release every daily and Sunday strip of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts," the best-known and best-loved series in the world. Most everyone with an interest in its history has seen the very first strip ("Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!"), but this first volume follows it up with 287 pages (three daily strips or one Sunday per page) of vintage material in chronological order. "Peanuts" was unique at the time for portraying kids who seemed like real kids, but they also had a wisdom beyond their years, embodied especially by the lovable loser, Charlie Brown, who even in these early years has lost 4000 checker games in a row. We see him don his familiar jagged-stripe shirt for the first time (December 1950) and, at the age of 4, at his peak as a babe magnet. Shermy is the other significant boy, and the girls in their lives are Patty (not to be confused with Peppermint Patty) and Violet. Schroeder is an infant who has learned to sit up in order to play Beethoven on his toy piano. Snoopy is an anthropomorphic dog who plays baseball (April 1952) and has his own thoughts (October 1952). In March 1952 we meet a bug-eyed Lucy, who by November has been designated "Miss Fuss-Budget of 1952" and is pulling the football away from Charlie Brown (Violet had done it a year earlier). Her baby brother Linus arrives in July 1952. The book itself is beautifully packaged, the strips printed large and clear on high-quality paper and accompanied by an in-depth essay by David Michaelis, a 1987 interview with Schulz, an introduction by Garrison Keillor, and even an index of characters and subjects. It's so well-done that any reader will be impatient for the rest of the series, but in the meantime this is a book to savor. --David Horiuchi

From Publishers Weekly

With its ambitious plan to reprint all of "Peanuts" in chronological order over the next 12 years, Fantagraphics is making this comics masterpiece available for everyone. The real surprise of this first volume is watching the beloved comic strip develop from its embryonic stage. From the start, Schulz had some of the ground rules in place: the ensemble cast whose faces appeared only in profile or three-quarter views, the sophisticated language from the mouths of babes and the absence of visible adults from their world. But, although "good ol' Charlie Brown" appears in the very first strip, the early protagonist is the rather colorless Shermy. Lucy is a googly-eyed baby in a playpen; Linus and Schroeder are pre-verbal infants; and Snoopy is just a small, affectionate dog without a fantasy life. Even more odd, the strip's unique hilarity hasn't quite developed yet; most of the humor here is very mild and generally stems from the characters being little kids playing with each other and fooling around with grown-up roles. They're archetypes of children, not yet archetypes of humanity. Still, flashes of Schulz's later greatness are evident. All the characters show hints of the personalities they'll grow into, and Schulz's clean, magisterially expressive line falls into position by the end of the strip's second year. Regardless, the chance to see the early "Peanuts"—much of it never before reprinted—is a treat.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 156097589X
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Fantagraphics; First Edition (May 17, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 360 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781560975892
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1560975892
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.07 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.8 x 1.3 x 8.6 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,239 ratings

About the author

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Charles M. Schulz

Charles M. Schulz

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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).

In his senior year in high school, his mother noticed an ad in a local newspaper for a correspondence school, Federal Schools (later called Art Instruction Schools). Schulz passed the talent test, completed the course and began trying, unsuccessfully, to sell gag cartoons to magazines. (His first published drawing was of his dog, Spike, and appeared in a 1937 Ripley's Believe It Or Not! installment.) Between 1948 and 1950, he succeeded in selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post—as well as, to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press, a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks. It was run in the women's section and paid $10 a week. 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. In the spring of 1950, he received a letter from the United Feature Syndicate, announcing their interest in his submission, Li'l Folks. Schulz boarded a train in June for New York City; more interested in doing a strip than a panel, he also brought along the first installments of what would become Peanuts—and that was what sold. (The title, which Schulz loathed to his dying day, was imposed by the syndicate). 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.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
1,239 global ratings
Fascinating, but primarily for 'Peanuts' completists
3 Stars
Fascinating, but primarily for 'Peanuts' completists
Anyone trying to get a bead on American humor and cultural values during the latter half of the 20th century obviously has their work cut out for them, but they could do worse than to start with the comic strips of Charles Schulz. His "Peanuts" strips are pure Americana. This volume, the first of several encompassing the entirety of the comic strip's lifespan, shows us how it all began, and for that reason it's kind of fascinating. Both the drawings and the text are rudimentary compared to the "Peanuts" we know. Charlie Brown and especially Snoopy -- who unlike in later years doesn't express himself here -- look far different from what we're used to, and some of the "Peanuts" characters we're familiar with are nowhere to be found yet, such as Linus, who first appeared late in 1952."Peanuts" arguably hit its stride in the 1970's, and volumes featuring those strips are available as well. This volume may be considered essential for anyone determined to own "Peanuts" in its entirety, but that's a lot a books to buy, involving much time, money and fortitude. For those more interested in sampling Schulz' work over the decades, however, this is the obvious place to start.
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Top reviews from the United States

Bijan Khoshnood
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Ol Charlie Brown!
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2023
Verified Purchase
We gave this to our daughter for her 9th birthday and she read the whole book in two days. She continues to read it over and over. Having become a fan of the Peanuts TV specials, she has come to love the original comics. Now I have to get her volume two.

This is the original strip and the jokes are as funny and relevant today as they were when they were published 70 years ago. What is amazing is that Charles Schultz wrote and illustrated the Peanuts strip by himself for the 50 years it was in publication.
My only disappointment was that the whole book is in black and white, but that may be how it was originally published, in which case it’s better they keep it that way.
4 people found this helpful
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nadine robinson
5.0 out of 5 stars Peanuts Fan
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2024
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My son, 34, was a huge Peanuts fan as a child and still is. I purchased this for me because he first book was lost in moving. He loves it!
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B
5.0 out of 5 stars Love these books
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2024
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Bought this one and the last volume for my daughter for Christmas. These are awesome, well made books, that are clearly printed and easy reading size. Highly recommend to anyone who is a fan of the Peanuts gang!
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John S. Vamossy
5.0 out of 5 stars Bravo! Excellent Job!
Reviewed in the United States on May 7, 2004
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After years of only being able to find Peanuts strips in seemingly random and incomplete anthologies, "The Complete Peanuts" project is finally giving the work of Charles Schulz the respect it deserves.
By publishing all the Peanuts strips in their entirety and in chronological order, this Fantagraphics project is for the first time treating the Peanuts comics not as a mere collection of individual strips but as a unified whole: as a complete work in itself.
Despite having read many other Peanuts collections, a vast majority of the strips in "1950-1952" were new to me. It's fascinating to see the beginnings of a strip that would become so popular and influential. The look of the characters is much different from their later incarnations, but the gentle wit and philosophical insight that characterized the entire Peanuts series are definitely in evidence.
The extra features such as the index and Charles Schulz profile and interview were pleasant surprises and a nice touch. It is clear that for the people who put this together it was a labor of love. If future volumes are of this quality, the series will be a treasure. I'm excitedly awaiting the next volume, covering 1953-1954.
Two minor criticisms: I must concur with an earlier reviewer who expressed concerns about the long-term durability of the binding... but I guess only time will tell how well it'll hold up. Also, as has been pointed out, the Sunday comics are in black and white. I don't know if they were originally printed in color at this early date, but if so, reproducing them in color in this volume would have been a nice touch and I certainly would have been willing to pay extra for this. That having been said, however, these issues do not seriously detract from the overall enjoyment of this well-done first volume. I do not hesitate in giving The Complete Peanuts 1950-1952 a solid 5-star rating.
9 people found this helpful
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Thurston Howell IV
4.0 out of 5 stars Nearly great, not perfect
Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2013
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Bought this volume because: 1) Peanuts was my favorite comic strip growing up in the 60s/70s, and 2) I have a paperback from the early 50s that included many of the strips in Vol. 1, and I wanted to see the early development of characters contained in the first volume.

A plus is that this book includes every strip in the time period, but a minus is that the Sunday strips are not in color. I was surprised at the book's rather small dimensions, but the paper stock is top quality and the daily strips are printed at least as large as they were published in newspapers. Another surprise is that even in the earliest 1950s Sunday strips, the top one-third of the strip could be removed by a publisher without any loss of continuity contained in the lower two-thirds of the strip - I thought this was a much later creation that allowed newspapers to jam their Sunday strips into fewer pages.

I never intended to purchase the entire series, just the first volume. And while later volumes may contain higher quality strips that I would probably enjoy more, I'm satisfied with volume one. Schulz's work diminished considerably in his later years, so I would never consider purchasing the entire series. However, I do recommend The Complete Calvin and Hobbes volumes - Bill Watterson was smart to quit while he was still at the top of his creative game.
4 people found this helpful
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Good
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2023
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Good book for peanuts fans. It's pizza time. Super cute as well but the fact remains of your friends to beat one that was my favorite type
One person found this helpful
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Angie Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars Book arrived when promised.
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2023
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The book was a gift. They loved it. Book arrived in good condition.
One person found this helpful
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Yendor
5.0 out of 5 stars Li'l Folks
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2005
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Before Charlie Brown developed into the lovable loser, and before Snoopy and Woodstock took over the strip, this collection of the first two years is an excellent compilation of PEANUTS. It is hard to imagine, but in these early strips, Charlie Brown is more of a DENNIS THE MENACE and girls are actually fighting over his affection (i.e. Violet, Patty, and Lucy). Snoopy is actually a "pet dog" and inventive in the early years and, as support player, is more likeable and refreshing than his modern day persona which pervades the main focus of the strip in the later years. Sifting through the multitude of these daily panels, we do see the early glimpses of what is to come (i.e. Lucy, Charlie Brown, and the infamous football),Charlie Brown's famous shirt, Shroeder becoming a "concert pianist" with references to Beethoven, etc. This is a must have for all PEANUTS lovers with strips that haven't been reprinted or seen since their debut fifty years ago. Charles M. Schulz' simple but effective line drawing shows off a little more dimension in the early art work with some compicated "sets" and "backgrounds" with added perspective in some of the panels. Finally, the most important thing is Schulz' writing. The dialogue and situations he puts upon his characters is what makes PEANUTS a cut above the rest especially in the early years of Charlie Brown and cast.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Hugo Cortes
5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting
Reviewed in Brazil on December 5, 2022
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It’ a a good reading, and a clases of history: watch the first characters of the strip Is very nice. I recommend it to everyone.
2 people found this helpful
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Jetscook
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic...great quality hard cover
Reviewed in Canada on June 5, 2021
Verified Purchase
These are great... hard cover books that just look great at a reasonable price.
My 7 year old son loves peanuts and I started him off with the first year and he will get one volume now for every birthday, Christmas, and Easter.
They are beautiful books and in time he will have the entire library.
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Collatin
5.0 out of 5 stars Très bon volume
Reviewed in France on August 26, 2023
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Premier intégrale de la série, c'est excellent, l'édition est belle et l'anglais tout à fait abordable.
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HrishiDixit
5.0 out of 5 stars Nice
Reviewed in India on October 29, 2020
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Nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice amazing good best stupendous nothing more better
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Cliente de Kindle
4.0 out of 5 stars Sobre edición del ebook
Reviewed in Mexico on January 26, 2017
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Leí este libro en celular y a veces da la opción de ver viñeta por viñeta, y a veces no lo permite, por lo que hay que andar haciendo más grande la hoja, hacerle zoom. Ese es el único inconveniente de la edición.
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