Before Thanksgiving and the shopping season overcomes us, let’s make sure we start our annual Panels & Prose quick takes on recent books for comic strip fans. The pile of new releases is high and teetering, so let’s break this down into several posts this week and next. Today, we handle the celebratory and anniversary collections involving Peanuts, Hagar, Beetle Baley. For a hands-on look at these books, look for the video “Quick Flip” at the end.

Anniversary Parties

Typically we stick to the pre-1960 comic strip and pre-Code comic book era around here. But several Anniversary retrospectives from the modern era have taken a similar approach this year. They dance across the history of a beloved strip, reprinting key moments and illustrating the evolution of characters and artisitic style.

We have already covered in some depth the wonderful, generous Hagar the Horrible: The First Fifty Years, in a longer review. In addition to good background on roots and artistry of Dik Browne’s  likeable barbarian, the book is well curated to highlight the best wit from each era of its creation. We would like to see more retrospectives of this kind, which spend more time reprinting the work rather than reminiscing about it.

That is not quite the model for Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey: 75 Years of Smiles, but won’t gripe about it. Mort’s son Brian is such a talented and insightful curator and analyst of comics history generally and this strip in particular (which he co-created for many years) that his history of Beetle is an unusually thoughtful “celebration.” He walks us through the transformation Beetle as a college goofball and hound dog into the world’s most famous Army slacker. We get a ton of original art, marketing and merchandising offshoots, as well as a good-enough sampling of key strips in each decade. We go behind the scenes on the creative process and workflow. As in his other work on comics history, Brian Walker is very sensitive to the ways in which Beetle Bailey intersected with evolving attitudes towards the military, race, sexual relations. Like many American strips of the 60s and 70s, Beetle Bailey tried to register surrounding social change with delayed response and diffusion. Lt. Flap instructs Gen. Halftrack on the proper form of Black Power salute as a gag, without naming it, and several years after the gesture was made controversial at the 1968 Olympics. And let’s not even start on how Miss Buxley somehow finds feminism. But that of course is the whole spirit of Beetle Bailey, and why this five-decade dance across its run is valuable.

How many more ways can we repackage Charles Schulz’s Peanuts? That is a rhetorical question, to which we may never know the answer. Twenty-five years after the strip’s end and Schulz’s passing, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, et. al. remain he most recognizable comics figures of all time. And so Mark Evanier’s The Essential Peanuts by Charles Schulz: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time, gets no argument from us on its central claim. In fact, the multi-talented comics creator and historian Evanier does give us a valuable, novel way of marking Peanuts’ 75^th Anniversary year. He has wrapped his retrospective and analysis around 75 “essential” episodes.

And so Essential #19 is a two-week sequence of dailies chronicling Linus’ attempt to quit his security blanket cold turkey in 1960. Essential #35 finds Charlie Brown taking a line drive in 1967 that violently, comically flips and disrobes him. Evanier adds several other cases of Schulz’s approach to physical mayhem. Essential #50 captures the quintessential Peppermint Patty/Marcie dynamic played out when Patty improbably wins an essay contest in 1985. Evanier recounts how at this point in the strip Patty and Marcie almost seemed to take over the strip as Schulz delighted in pitting Patty’s irrational impulsiveness against Marcie’s officious realism.

The Essential Peanuts is very much a collectors’ item. The boxed package includes ephemera like stickers, postcards and even the a replica of the embroidered Snoope spacesuit patch worn by the Apollo launch crew. Regardless,  hats off to Evanier for making this an unusually thoughtful collection. In addition to identifying key moments and tropes in Schulz’s approach to cartooning, he packs around the “Essentials” many insightful quotes and insights from the creator himself and many fellow cartoonists. You will learn something from this commemoration.

A Lot of Donald

One major holiday release we have not gotten in yet is Taschen Books’ annual doorstop, the first volume of their Carl Barks Library reprints is scheduled to drop before Christmas. It will cover in supersized XXL format the first 8 years of Bark’s run of Donald Duck comics. Taschen’s celebration of Donald Duck last year teased what we might expect from this book. Like its reprints of Marvel and EC titles, they scan original comics pages rather than fully restore and recolor pristine proofs. From the select Barks pages reproduced in last year’s book, I expect to experience a ful immersion in that old comics page feel. The Duck Man’s famous large panel panoramas of key action will have the room to breathe. I am really looking forward to this one.