The Complete Peanuts Vol. 5

Book excerpt: As the first decade of Peanuts closes, it seems only fitting to bid farewell to that halcyon decade with a cover starring Patty, one of the original three Peanuts. Major new additions to classic Peanuts lore come fast and furious here. Snoopy begins to take up residence atop his doghouse, and his repertoire of impressions increases exponentially. Lucy sets up her booth and offers her first five-cent psychiatric counsel. (Her advice to a forlorn Charlie Brown: "Get over it.") For the very first time, Linus spends all night in the pumpkin patch on his lonely vigil for the Great Pumpkin (although he laments that he was a victim of "false doctrine," he's back 12 months later). Linus also gets into repeated, and visually explosive, scuffles with a blanket-stealing Snoopy, suffers the first depredations of his blanket-hating grandmother, and falls in love with his new teacher Miss Othmar. Even more importantly, several years after the last addition to the cast ("Pig-Pen"), Charlie Brown's sister Sally makes her appearance―first as an (off-panel) brand new baby for Charlie to gush over, then as a toddler and eventually a real, talking, thinking cast member. (By the end of this volume, she'll already start developing her crush on Linus.) All this, and one of the most famous Peanuts strips ever: "Happiness is a warm puppy." Almost one hundred of the 731 strips collected in this volume (including many Sundays) have never been collected in any book since their original release, with one hundred more having been collected only once in relatively obscure and now impossible-to-find books; in other words, close to one quarter of the strips have never been seen by anyone but the most avid Peanuts completists.