The Complete Peanuts 1963-1964 (Charles M. Schulz)

A good addition to this series. The only let-down is that we're seeing more and more strips that have already been collected in other Peanuts books. It was bound to happen though, so I'm not knocking off a star for this. There are two real gems to this book. One is the story where Linus (my absolute favorite Peanuts character) runs for class president. I'm betting Schultz had a lot of fun with this. He lampoons the entire election process. This includes the speeches and promises, the press coverage, the polling, and everything else. The other gem is even more important to me. This is where the title of my review comes into play. They had the great Bill Melendez write the foreward for this book. Mister Melendez was an animator who wound up directing every single Peanuts movie and special ever made. In addition to this, he also did the voices of Snoopy and Woodstock on most of them (the exceptions being those few specials where Snoopy actually talked). Considering his close ass... Read more

This edition of The Complete Peanuts covers the years 1963 and 1964. Probably the most significant event during this time period was the introduction of "5", along with his sisters "3" and "4". 5 may not be well remembered, but he is still a pretty interesting character. These are classic comic strips from one of the masters of the medium. Great stuff, highly recommended.

This book, along with the rest of the collection, is simply marvelous. The complete work of Schulz is nicely presented. It reads itself so fast that we can't keep up buying the next one!

Much of this was more of the same, the continued development of the characters. There is a set of new characters (Five, with Four and Three coming later) but they turn out to be little more than props, good for a week or two and afterwards for when Schulz needed a generic male for Charlie Brown (Shermy now only shows up for group strips). Three and Four look like little Peppermint Patties, and since Peppermint Patty ends up coming from a single-parent family (father only) one wonders if this is sort of backstory for that. Foreshadowing some of the changes coming up on the next volume are a couple of developments. The baseball mound has become a scene itself, where the characters come up to chat on various things. As for this volume (1963-64), it's just a couple of characters coming up with things to talk about. As for the red-headed girl, she has changed from a merely distant figure (distant implying "out of Charlie Brown's League) to a seemingly active source of shame and humili... Read more

I came to peanuts cartoons late in my life, but for the past five years I have bought every book available. Luckily for me as I have been a customer of amazon both in america and england and bringing out yearly books has been marvelous. Whenever I feel down I just read a few pages and I'm fine. The trouble is Im' going to be around 80 years old before this complete series is printed!!!! Is there anyway we can move this along? Doreen uk