Celebrating Snoopy. By Charles M.
Schulz. Andrews McMeel. $75.
There are very, very few publishers that accord comics the respect they
deserve as an art form and a communications medium unlike any other. Among
them, Andrews McMeel is pre-eminent, with its outstanding hardcover “tribute”
books that display and pay homage to some of the great and enduring examples of
the form: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes,
Dilbert 2.0, A Doonesbury Retrospective, Epic Big Nate and others.
Equally to the point, there are very, very few cartoonists who are able
to create mini-universes with their strips and then sustain them at a uniformly
high level for decade after decade. These do not include famous names such as Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes ran for only 10 years,
or Gary Larson, whose The Far Side
ran for 15, for example – but they do include George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944), Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948-1975), and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950-2000). And now Andrews
McMeel has once again outdone itself with a marvelous slipcased hardcover
volume devoted to one of the truly great comics and cartoonists – focusing this
time not on the strip as a whole (the publisher’s Celebrating Peanuts already did that in 2009) but on one of the
most unusual, endearing and downright strange characters in it: Snoopy.
The fact that Snoopy does not seem particularly strange these days is
testimony to how deeply and effectively Schulz developed this little beagle
(not originally conceived as a beagle, except that he thought the word sounded
funny – one of many revelations in this book). Snoopy’s personality, like that
of any other human or animal character, changed in many ways through the years,
but his basic conception was a simple and brilliant one that made all the later
changes flow in ways that seemed natural. Celebrating
Snoopy offers a perfect way to see Snoopy’s early days and trace his
development, while not incidentally following the changes in the Peanuts strip itself. Readers will learn
that Snoopy was based on a dog Schulz once had named Spike – and Spike
eventually appears in Peanuts as
Snoopy’s brother. Readers who know Snoopy’s famous impersonations and flights
of fancy, ranging from the World War I Flying Ace to “Joe Cool” and many
others, will here find Snoopy’s very first, very limited attempts to be
something else: a wolf, a vampire bat, a vulture and more. Readers who cannot
imagine Snoopy lying anywhere except atop his doghouse will here find the first
time he did that (December 12, 1958) and be able to trace how that one new
element of the strip led to many, many others as Snoopy’s personality flowered.
At
the same time, readers will here see Snoopy’s first eight years, before the
first on-the-doghouse panel – years in which Snoopy understands what the human characters
say but reacts to them in more traditionally doglike ways, as when he hears
that refined people speak softly and changes his loud bark to a quiet one. Snoopy’s
relationship with Charlie Brown (whom he later just calls “the round-headed
kid”) is seen developing here, too: Charlie Brown fails to catch a baseball,
the ball hits Snoopy, and after a series of “arf!” remarks, Charlie Brown
comments that he hates to “get bawled out by a dog”; but in contrast, a Sunday
strip shows Charlie Brown brought to tears by Snoopy’s enthusiastic greeting –
and then somewhat spoiling the moment by wiping his tears on Snoopy’s floppy
ear. On and on Snoopy’s development goes, with remarks by Schulz (made in
various venues at various times) adding to the step-by-step progress seen in
the strips (all beautifully reproduced and carefully shown with their original
dates). Schulz was well aware of the more and more surrealistic world he was
building for and around Snoopy, explaining at one point why the inside of the
doghouse is never seen and why there is never any background behind it (“it
would become too real”). For example, Snoopy is first shown ice-skating wearing
four skates on his four paws, but it is not long before he is skating while
standing on his hind legs and without actually wearing skates – sometimes even
in his frozen water dish (February 23, 1964). And while Snoopy is seen dancing
almost from the start of the strip, his original four-legged dances seem stiff
(although he is always happy doing them) when compared with the
now-more-familiar “happy dance” for which Snoopy is justifiably renowned.
In
fact, there are many reasons Snoopy is renowned, and many more for which Schulz
is celebrated, and Celebrating Snoopy
offers a prodigious number of them through 550 superb oversized pages. There
are more levels of joy here than can easily be enumerated: the joy of
discovering or rediscovering one of the greatest comic strips of all; the joy
of seeing the inner life of a comic-strip dog brilliantly displayed in ways
that make absolute sense in context while seeming to touch on what real-world
dogs might be thinking; the joy of
nostalgia for the ways in which Peanuts
developed over the years; the bittersweet joy of finding or re-finding
especially beloved strips in the knowledge that there can be no more; and the
unalloyed joy of the whole beautifully produced assemblage of material in a
book that deserves pride of place in any comic-strip lover’s library. If Celebrating Snoopy, one of the very best
comic-strip collections of recent years, does not make you feel like doing your
very own “happy dance,” there is something missing not only in your sense of
humor but also in your basic humanity and your capacity for wonder and delight.
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