I wrote this for The Comics Journal's year-end issue in 2001. It never ran, presumeably due to an editorial shake-up. But I did get a kill fee, so maybe the piece isn't totally worthless. There are a few errors, but I'm not going to bother correcting them.

It was originally about Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, but the outgoing editor asked me to expand it considerably to include Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits, as well as two other books, which, considering what happened to the piece, I'm glad I was never able to track down. ">The Art of Charles M. Schulz was just released in paperback, with 32 new pages.

++++

Pantheon’s new book Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, is absolutely beautiful and needs to be purchased by every student of comic art in general and every fan of Peanuts in particular. This book is amazing in many, many ways. Some wags on the Internet have been predicting an inevitable Chip Kidd backlash after the recent Jack Cole opus, but it won’t come from this book, which manages an almost perfect meeting of both the material and the aesthetic.

The inside cover sports a sketch and autograph by Schultz that almost looks hand-inscribed. From there, we see marvels including a photo of Schulz’s drawing tools (although preserved exactly as he left them when he stopped drawing, which is sort of creepy), a high school yearbook page starring a ridiculously young-looking Charles Schulz (underneath a girl named Schroeder) and sketchbook pages dating from his stint in the army (which reveal a surprisingly white and crisp style). From there, we move on to the true meat of the book: reproduction of the strips from original art and ancient newspaper clippings, astonishing for their fidelity.

Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz elegantly conveys the experiences of looking at different presentations of the strip. Because the newspaper strips, the original art and the sketchbook drawings were photographed in situ rather than digitally scanned and restored, the reader experiences the works represented on the page as similarly as possible to the experience of seeing them in the original.

The amount of care and fidelity that went into the reproductions is amazing, bringing to mind the disclaimer that appears on compact discs, which warns, “… high resolution also reveals limitations in the master… including noise and other distortions.”

Those distortions, which in this case include dirt, smudges, creases, fingerprints and coffee stains, are part of what makes this book so poignant and so real. It would be a real pleasure and privileges to have the opportunity to page through Sparky’s sketchbooks, to touch his original art and sit in his workspace and eavesdrop as he created. Chip Kidd practically has had that, and has given us the next best thing: a book that replicates the experience.

The strips are not reprinted from the original art are reproduced from vintage strips clipped, mounted and preserved, and photographed as is for this book. It’s just like looking that original collection!

Not having seen any of Schulz’s original art, I’ll have to take it on faith that seeing the strips printed from the originals is JUST LIKE SEEING THE ORIGINALS THEMSELVES. Even if that isn’t the case, there’s a nice tactile pleasure to being able to see the edges from the paste-overs, or the brushstrokes in the blacks.

There’s more to the book than the propeller-head thrill of design and faithful reproduction, though. More than half of the strips date from the Fifties, many being reprinted for the first time. Much of what made Peanuts great in there in embryo. That should itself be a hell of an encouragement, to see these seminal pieces, in which Snoopy walked on four legs, Lucy was a baby and Charlie Brown was a spunky wise-ass. Even then, however, there is still a strip from 1951 about how no one likes him, which isn’t even remotely funny. Shades of the future. And it’s refreshing to see that even a genius like Schulz plagiarized himself within the first few years of the strip. Once Schulz hit his stride, take him decades to swipe wholesale from his best ideas again.

Hopefully, this book’s success will give the keepers of the flame reason to believe the public might indeed be ready and appreciative of the early Peanuts, and give some impetus to an orderly, complete reprinting of the greatest comic strip of the second half of the twentieth century.

To step down for a moment from foaming-at-the-mouth praise, Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz certainly has its flaws. Chip Kidd’s commentary has the air of an informed if hardly expert writer composing from memory, and so, mistakes are made. The biggest error I noticed (I suppose it was the biggest precisely because I did notice) was Kidd’s statement that Schulz wanted Peanuts to be titled Good Ol’ Charlie Brown. In fact, Schulz always preferred the title Li’l Folks. The mistake is particularly nonsensical when one considers the prominence other characters have always had in Peanuts. Also, if I know that, Kidd certainly should have.

More disturbing is much of what Kidd includes as "art" in addition to the strips. Admittedly, it is difficult to evaluate Peanuts overall without acknowledging the massive amount of merchandizing, shilling and selling out that have been part of the Peanuts experience from almost the beginning. But to title a book The Art of Charles M. Schulz is to call attention to the art, first and foremost, and it is hard to see tacky figurines of the more popular characters with spring-set bobbing heads as being "art" in even the broadest, most philistine sense.

The selection and ordering of strips itself has its ups and down. Kidd has arranged the strips in his own idiosyncratic order, roughly chronological in the sense that the early ones are near the beginning and the later ones are near the end, and focusing on the strips as art rather than continuity, which suits the purpose of the book. I suppose leaving this reader wanting more isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it still left this reader wanting more. But with something like 15,000 strips to choose from, it was unavoidable.

That said, I was driven nuts by Kidd’s habit of quoting from strips not reproduced. Anyone who has tried to describe a comic to someone inevitably fails to it justice, and Kidd shouldn’t have tried to do it here. Even that is understandable: there are few strips more quotable than Peanuts. And the strips he quoted might not have been what he was looking for visually. But still, annoying.

That’s just gripes, though.

It is understandable and forgivable in that this is not a work of scholarship. Much like Viking Press’ recent Jorge Luis Borges series, this is a work of appreciation and discovery. The aim is taking joy in exploring long out of print strips, and reveling in the gorgeous reproduction. There are no claims of definiteness or comprehensiveness.

I refer the reader to the foaming-at-the-mouth praise in the first two-thirds of this review, or better yet, to the book itself. The pleasure outweighs the pain by far. The reproduction. The sense of both discovery, and re-discovery. And the strips themselves. There is even a sketch of the little red haired girl.

In an unimaginative segue, this brings us more or less to Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits.

Many of the annoyances in the Peanuts book are present in Jack Cole and Plastic Man. So are many of its strengths, but in this case, they come close to sinking the whole thing.

The book contains multiple pleasures. Art Spiegelman’s New Yorker essay on Cole from 1999 is reprinted, five complete comic book reprints, including four Plastic Man stories, one featuring a solo Woozie Winks, his famous “injury to the eye” story “Murder, Morphine and Me,” and selection of his panel cartooning in Playboy. Strangely, even though Spiegelman points to Betsy and Me as the skeleton key to Cole’s suicide, only a few strips are reprinted. The rest of the book is filled with clippings, collaged and expanded and enlarged.

While this approach worked for Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, it fails here. One reason for its success in the Schulz book is by virtue of the source material: a clipping of a four panel daily strip can easily contain the whole strip; a clipping of a comic book page will be necessity separate the panels from the others with which it was juxtaposed.

As a result, the focus here is much more on Kidd’s design. Which is too bad. The best way to enjoy comic art is in its context, and we have so little of that here. Continuity and page design are sacrificed in order to call attention to the caricature, grotesques and distortions Cole often committed to the comic book page, as if he were Basil Wolverton.

The story reprints are presented on browned and yellowed paper, the better, apparently, to capture that old feeling of reading the musty originals. There has never been any virtue to the crappy paper, off-register color and shrill melodrama, and Kidd does a disservice to the art form by trying to claim that is so. It is ridiculous to present the cheap ten-cent comics of a half-century ago as art objects, and if the stories themselves are to be viewed as art, they need to hold up on their own. If Cole’s stories, or anyone’s, of interest only as nostalgia, then they are of no interest at all.

The difference, at least between the Cole book and Schulz book, may be the difference between art in general and comic books in general. The overall effect of Kidd’s design of the Peanuts book is personalization. For something as personal and sentimental as Peanuts, a strip that is and has always been a part of the lives of just about everyone on the planet, this is an important thing, and feels like a gift. Peanuts justifies itself though its own depth and quality.

For better or for worse, Jack Cole’s lesser-known work is better served by being evaluated on its own terms, uncluttered by another’s visual verbiage. And it isn’t here. As a result, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits is not so much a book on or about Jack Cole as it is a book inspired by Jack Cole. Luckily, Cole’s work is strong enough to lend itself to such translation, although the originals are better.

One element in Kidd’s design sense that has been flawless has been his endings. The closing pages of Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz brings a tear to the eye, and at a crucial point, Forms Stretched to Their Limits provokes a similar reaction.

The reprinted Spiegelman essay is excellent, one of the best prose pieces he has ever written. The piece is informative and engaging, telling the story of Cole’s life, explaining the importance of his work, and illuminating the historical context in which it first appeared. At the end of his essay, near the end of the book, Spiegelman notes, “As he climbed his ladder of success, up from the primal mulch of the comic books, he finally arrived at air that was too thin to breather: Jack Cole, a comics genius, died of growing up,” which Kidd follows with eighteen pages of blown up images clipped from Silver Streak Comics, Plastic Man, CRIME Does Not Pay and other comics, as well as Playboy, and Cole’s own obituary. Spiegelman’s word’s provide, in the end, touching lyrics bridging to an imagistic coda derived from the many themes discernable in Cole’s work. It’s heartbreaking.