The Complete Peanuts 1983-1984: Vol. 17 Hardcover Edition

As Peanuts reaches the mid-1980s, Charles Schulz is still creating and playing with new characters, and in this volume Snoopy's deadpan, droopy-mustached brother Spike takes center stage: Surrounded by coyotes in the desert where he lives and who are attacking him with rubber bands, he sends a frantic message to Snoopy who launches an expedition to save him. Then, he makes the long trek back to Snoopy's neck of the woods accompanied by his only friend (a cactus, of course)... and throughout the rest of the book, pops up in hilarious, Waiting for Godot-style vignettes set in his native Needles.

In romantic news, the Peppermint Patty-Marcie-Charlie Brown love triangle of overlapping unrequited love heats up (well, kind of ), while Linus continues to vociferously deny that he is Sally's "Sweet Babboo"; of course, Lucy's unsuccessful pursuit of Schroeder remains unabated. Also, a romance blossoms between two of Snoopy's "Beagle Scout" birds. (We will pass over Spike's brief attraction to one of the coyotes.)

In what is probably his most baroque and hilarious baseball-involved humiliation yet, Charlie Brown agrees to join Peppermint Patty's team the "Pelicans" only to discover that he's wanted not as a player but as a mascot... Linus gives up his security blanket and forms a support group for other kids who are trying to do the same... and Peppermint Patty manages to be held back in school (leaving a "Snoring Ghost" to take her place in the rest of the class that has advanced) and yet get to go on a European trip with her dad, sending back periodic dispatches from the road. All this plus appearances from Franklin, Rerun, and the rest of the gang in these strips from a period of Peanuts that's far less well-known than the endlessly-collected 1960s and 1970s eras...

Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google). His ambition from a young age was to be a cartoonist and his first success was selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post between 1948 and 1950. He also sold a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.

He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates and in the spring of 1950, United Feature Syndicate expressed interest in Li'l Folks. They bought the strip, renaming it Peanuts, a title Schulz always loathed. The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952. Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day-and the day before his last strip was published, having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand -- an unmatched achievement in comics.