Category: Reviews

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Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate

In a city somewhere, there’s a tall man, bald on top. We don’t know his name. We don’t know his job, or if he has one. We know he lives in a small apartment, plagued by a mouse he keeps trying to catch, and that he eats some kind of canned food, maybe exclusively, and gets big packages of the cans in the mail. We think he’s some kind of a nut, or a hermit, or similar – one of those urban types who radiate a “don’t talk to me” aura as you see them stalking down the street or ranting on a corner or staring intently at something you can’t see.

This man has bad eyesight: he wears glasses sometimes, contacts sometimes. One day, he finds a flyer about eye correction – a local clinic is offering a two-eyes-for-the-price-of-one deal, with the testing upfront thrown in free and satisfaction guaranteed. He puts the flyer away, but remembers it when, the next morning, he accidentally steps on his glasses, breaking them.

So he goes to the clinic, which we readers see is shadier than he realizes. He’s tested, has the operation. He seems to stay in that clinic, just lying on a table recuperating, for many days, and eventually goes home, his sight hugely improved. But he has floaters – more than before, sometimes overwhelmingly so. (As someone who has had his optometrist say to him “you have a lot of floaters” basically every yearly visit for two decades, I sympathize but also think he’s over-reacting. But I think his deal is to over-react.)

Things escalate; the man, as we may have expected, tends to be paranoid and subject to conspiratorial thinking…and may also be right.

This is Laser Eye Surgery , the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Tate works in thin lines, tightly defined and precise, almost mechanical but with life and energy to them. His writing is laconic and minimal; the story told mostly through images.

The defining image, in fact, is of this man, striding at pace – often away from the viewer, usually at an angle. Always without eyes – either his face is turned away or Tate just doesn’t draw that level of detail. His eyes show up in close-up, and drive some imagistic sequences where the floaters wander about and proliferate, in a way we think the man considers deliberate.

Tate tells this story quietly, with an assurance that the reader will pick up the nuances and connect the dots – there’s no narration, and minimal details. This is a book about seeing, and so the reader must see it. I don’t know if I got all of the things Tate was trying to say, but I’m impressed by the power of his images and by the confident way he constructed this story; I want to see more of his work.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you’re reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings’ Day, in which case, go you), but that’s the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don’t know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don’t suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late ’60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson’s creative output. The special was never made; it’s ’60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that’s how we got to Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow .

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I’m-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor – which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue – opens, with five furry “monsters” emerging. They don’t talk, but they’re musical Muppets – each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He’s also got a plot – possibly originally unrelated – to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail – because it’s difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building – and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there’s a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump’s house – so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that’s how it works, but you don’t expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he’s hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the ’70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn’t, but it’s a comic now, so that’s close enough. It’s not a lost classic, but it’s a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson’s team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you’re looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read – and I was – there’s not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: The Awakening of Roku

The Awakening of Roku
By Randy Ribay
279 pages/Amulet Books/$21.99

I was once again invited to the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender with the most recent offering in their Legends series of young adult novels. After previously entering this world, with no prior knowledge, with City of Echoes, I am now tasked with evaluating Roku’s story, a follow-up to Randy Ribyay’s 2022 book The Reckoning of Roku.

We know Roku today as a powerful Airbender, but this duology takes us back to his beginnings, notably his training and emergence as a promising young avatar. We open, three years after the previous book, in the dead of winter as Roku leaves his master, feeling the time has come to go out on his own.

En route to Agna Qel’a, he is forced off-course when he encounters an illness that has spread to the people of a Northern Water Tribe settlement. As he tries to help them, he discovers there is much more to this than a mere disease. He winds up partnering with his good friend Gyatso and a gifted waterbender named Makittuq.

We come to learn that their Tribal Chief Tiguaa had been harboring vital resources for profit. The illness that drew Roku’s attention proved to be one of many, including one that made even placid animals aggressive, threatening the villagers.

Ribay does a nice job deepening the friendship between Roku and Gyatso. Even after years of training, our hero harbors self-doubts as he continues to master the four elements, culminating in airbending (his opposite element). Sozin, who those far better steeped in this lore are aware, knows to be a Fire Lord, but here he is younger and a good companion to Roku.  He spends time trying to get Roku to confess his love for Ta Min, referencing their meeting in the previous volume, but Roku never finds the courage to do so, showing his youth and naivety. Their established friendship foreshadows events to come.

Similarly, introducing the Water Tribe nicely expands the world. It gives us greater insight into the reality of the time the story is set in, well before the events of the animated series.

His style is clear and draws you along without losing you. As a novice to this reality, I had little trouble piecing things together. This book successfully delivers action, character growth, and more profound lore, even if its style differs from previous entries. 

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Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I’m pretty sure there weren’t any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that’s going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they’re out in the woods – but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank’s leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you’re defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank’s leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because “I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it’s a tasty grasshopper. You don’t want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it’s already gone,” which makes just as much sense as anyone’s motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes – plus the evil Aquabear from the first book – get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot’s zippiness, and creator Doug Savage’s clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts – I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I’ve finally found my way to the third book, 2009’s Graylight .

At the time, I referred to her as “a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry” and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art – paintings and jewelry, these days. I don’t want to say art is art – I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction – but it’s great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye – a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak’s complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects – especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn’t as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there’s a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She’s a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively – we think she does everything impulsively; she’s that kind of young person – goes along with Erik as his “photographer,” though we don’t see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there’s someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora’s house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik – this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There’s also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does – she’s a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There’s also what the book description calls a love triangle – Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on – but it’s not entirely clear if he’s in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he’s unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture – drawn in an idiosyncratic way – and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It’s a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it’s refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the “how I got here” story – whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don’t think that’s dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is “how I got here,” I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai’s first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger . It’s somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: “semi” is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn’t mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we’re reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed “Dear Beloved Stranger.” I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to – I’m not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction – she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the “Dear Beloved Stranger.” (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that “Cathy” was the real person in Pai’s actual life, and that bit is less “semi” and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he’s creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the “real” scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won’t spoil that here. It’s personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn’t there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he’s done since – which I did – we find that he’s mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I’m always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make “here’s how I broke through and actually started making art” stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there’s more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he’s been going since then.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel – set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously – he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He’s in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it’s the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup – they’re making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other – they’re grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That’s probably good for death metal, though. You don’t want to be too happy when you’re invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location – but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there’s something cool there they can put into the video?

They “break” into the shack – the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter’s cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario – creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a “schizo,” and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters’ diaries. He’s becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters .

Travis is unhappy – he started this band on a lark, but it’s not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what’s appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis’s story, we get flashbacks to Butters – he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters’ story – and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter’s wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn’t go well – Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first – and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That’s where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he’s mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that’s particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what’s here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven’t seen them yet.)

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman  tells an “and then this happened” version of the famous 19th century novelist’s life, I’m mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That’s the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman’s life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand’s writing, but more so on her relationships – with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject’s lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person’s life. That’s certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don’t know the person’s life all that well – as here – I’d really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood – spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France – but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore’s father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of “woman” and “aristocrat” as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs – but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it’s packed with details from all of Sand’s life – again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There’s a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand’s own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts – I don’t know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand’s life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I’ve never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I’ll say it’s a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: Megalopolis

Megalopolis
By Francis Ford Coppola, Chris Ryall, & Jacob Phillips
160 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99

While curious, I did not go to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. I had read about the trouble shoot, the confused critics, and the box office doldrums, and never got around to it on streaming. Thankfully, Abrams ComicArts has provided us with a graphic novel adaptation, which apparently isn’t slavish to the screenplay. Billed as an “alternate” version, it apparently is to be considered a sibling to the feature.

Coppola succumbs to the fascination with ancient Rome, which has become the cliché starting point for alternate futures such as The Hunger Games, Red Rising, and even Foundation. Somehow, the empire never fell, and futuristic wonders can be found in New Rome, which is our New York City.

It’s a story about family and competing visions of that future: one utopian in its aspirations, the other set in a regressive status quo.

That’s about all that makes sense. Chris Ryall, an accomplished writer and editor in his own right, fails to turn Coppola’s ideas into a coherent narrative with clearly defined characters. The worldbuilding raises more questions than it answers, and none of it is appealing. We root for none of the characters or, frankly, care about them long before the story ends. He’s billed as both writer and editor, and here, a seasoned editorial hand was required.

I gather the film’s narrative is its philosophical sweep, which isn’t evident here.

Similarly, cartoon Jacob Phillips is fine with the people, but New Rome needs to be a personality in its own right; we’re giving more of an impression of the city than something comprehensible.

I admire the experimentation evident in the project, but the execution does not deliver an enjoyable reading experience.

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REVIEW: The Essential Peanuts

The Essential Peanuts
By Mark Evanier
336 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$75

I was growing up during Peanuts’ peak period, the 1960s-70s, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing images of the gang. Yes, I bought some of the Fawcett paperback collections from the Bookmobile and was thrilled that Apollo 10’s command capsule and lunar module were named Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

I was also overwhelmed by the ubiquitousness of Snoopy, who easily eclipsed the humans and was on t-shirts, a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, lunch boxes, and so, so much more. I didn’t fully grasp the genius of Charles M. Shulz’s work until much later. It wasn’t my favorite strip, yet I read it every day, and I still do in the Classic Peanuts strip.

As a result, I was delighted to see this 75th anniversary overview of the strip and its global influence, along with the simplicity of Shulz’s linework. I learned about him from the recent Funny Things: A Comic Strip Biography of Charles M. Shulz and learned even more in this handsome collection.

The mammoth hardcover traces Peanuts in two ways: a 75 Essential strips, with commentary and supplemental strips; and a chronological exploration of the strip’s evolution, broken down by decade. As a result, you get some 700 daily and Sunday strips out of the 17,000+ he wrote and drew. One of the things that set Schulz apart from his peers was that he never, ever used assistants; he wrote, drew, and lettered each and every installment. That alone is worthy of celebration.

In Evanier’s clear-eyed prose, we see which new concepts or characters were introduced, which ones freshened, and which ones faded with time. Among the first casualties, for example, are Shermy and Patty, who were there on day one but were reduced to occasional background players within a year or two. We can see the rise of Snoopy’s sentience and then his playfulness as he turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel airplane, and how good ol’ Charlie Brown doesn’t quite know what to do with the newly arrived Peppermint Patty’s interest in him.

To me, the strip hit a crescendo in the late 1970s and then began a gradual decline, one that took the next 20 years to wind down. In the final years, health problems caused the steady line to wobble, the characters getting somewhat cruder, while the heart never left.

Accompanying Evanier are celebrity quotes drawn from Fantagraphics’ complete collection of the strip, as well as new sidebars written by translators and editors, who round out our understanding of the strip and its creator.

There is a second volume in this slipcase, filled with facsimiles of fun memorabilia that may bring back a memory, as it did for me, or just a smile. That’s all Shulz wanted from his readers, and he delivered daily for some 50 years, a totally remarkable accomplishment from the most unassuming of people.

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