As a reader born the same year that Schulz's strip debuted, my first experience with the early "Peanuts" was through small Fawcett paperback collections. A lot of the strips in this book never saw reprinting in those early paperbacks, presumably because the artist's vision of his kids had already developed to the point where their jokes were incompatible with their more established characters. In one early strip, for instance, Charlie Brown comes upon a drawing of himself rendered on a neighborhood fence. "That's not me at all!" he proclaims, and he fixes the caricature by affixing a big grin to its face. By the 1960's, our hero wouldn't have dreamed of altering that image: he just would've sighed and accepted it as one more random humiliation in a world packed with 'em.

The "Peanuts" gang may have had some limited growing up to do, but as a newspaper strip cartoonist, Schulz was in control of his medium from the get-go. These fifty-year-old strips remain funny - something you definitely can't say about many other strips from the same era (or, indeed, last week's "Cathy"). In a way, they seem fresher than the strips from the nineties, and not just because we're discovering many of the established strip routines for the first time (first time Charlie Brown gets a football moved away from him, it's not even done intentionally - or by Lucy). No, what helps to keep 'em fresh are Schulz's vision of childhood as a battleground and his sense of timing (influenced by comedian Jack Benny, David Michaelis notes in a supplementary biographical essay, and though I'd never recognized that fact before, it makes instant sense to me) impeccable. A lot of cartoonists have labored to replicate Schulz's voice, but they never quite get it.

It's not saying anything surprising to note that Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" is one of the singular achievements of comic strip art. But it is worth noting - after years of overexposure, diminishing return animated adaptations and Butternut bread commercials - that the strip can still be an unabashed joy to read. Next volume in Fantagraphics' reprint series is scheduled for autumn of this year. I'd start saving my pennies now. . .