This is a gorgeous collection of color Peanuts comics. The book is huge and unwieldy, so don't plan on having an easy time of it if you take it to bed with you for some nighttime reading. But there's something a little breathtaking about seeing these cartoons in such a large format, especially the cartoons just inside the front and back covers.

It was interesting to see earlier drawings of characters who have become so familiar. They're a little rounder, and to me, they somehow don't look like themselves. It's like a bunch of cartoons decided to dress up like the Peanuts gang. And the original Peanuts gang is not the group that stood the test of time. Shermie was Charlie Brown's friend long before Linus, and Violet and Patty were the main girls. For a while, Snoopy's on all fours, and he doesn't start stealing the show until about halfway through the collection. Lucy, when she shows up for the first time, is a toddler who is kind of the pet of the other kids. They seem to be babysitting her in several of the strips, Charlie Brown included. And Charlie Brown wasn't such a sad sack at the beginning, in fact, he was a bit more mischievous than the Charlie Brown I'm familiar with from the holiday specials and later comics. One of my favorite strips is one where Charlie Brown gets a bunch of kids excited about getting their picture taken. They all get dressed up for Charlie Brown to take their picture. When he holds up the camera to take the picture, it turns out to be a trick camera that has a toy jump out of the front like a jack-in-the-box. The last panel shows Charlie Brown gleefully running away from a crowd of angry children saying, "It's always a risk, but it keeps me young."

The strips weren't all a laugh riot, in fact, I would say the majority of them weren't that funny. But the collection was still a joy to page through, seeing the transformation of the comic strip that has been so dear to me since childhood. ( )