The complete Peanuts Volume 4, 1957 to 1958. Volume 4, 1957 to 1958.

The best-known, most-beloved kid strip is, of course, Peanuts, which graced newspaper comics sections for 50 years until artist Charles Schulz's death in 2000. This volume in Fantagraphics' series reprinting the strip's entire run covers 1957 and 1958, by which time its essentials were well established. The characters are what they would continue to be for four more decades: Lucy, bossy and selfish; Linus, quiet and grave; Snoopy, humbly whimsical; and, most important, Charlie Brown, utterly Charlie Brownish. Take that back a bit about Snoopy, who, as novelist Jonathan Franzen points out in the introduction, here begins his transition from recognizably canine ball fetcher and people licker to a near anthropomorph that impersonates other species and plays the violin atop Schroeder's piano (Little by little, Charlie Brown observes, that dog seems to be losing his mind ). Schulz's drawing style here is solider than it would be in later years, when the strip grew visually sparer yet even more expressive. Even these early strips, though, put to shame anything in the funny pages today. The latest compilation of the comic book Little Lulu reprints four 1947 issues in sharp black and white. Like Peanuts, Little Lulu is about suburban childhood, which its simple stories render as, essentially, an idyll. Lulu and her friends play hooky, bring home stray dogs, wage snowball fights, and steal apples from a neighbor's tree. In the hands of comics master Stanley, who wrote and laid Lulu out, those mundane activities are the stuff of artful hilarity. Although more than a half-century old, they seldom seem dated (well, one story does; in it Lulu and her pal Tubby are transfixed when they see a TV set for the first time). Stanley's tykes are more genuinely childlike than the Peanuts--no pint-sized philosophers among them--and unlike in Peanuts, adults feature prominently in Lulu, some of the funniest moments arising from parents' bemused reactions to the kids' high jinks. Schulz is droll and understated; Stanley, exuberant and clever; but the main difference is that Peanuts tells four-panel, character-based gags; Lulu, more leisurely narratives. --Gordon Flagg Copyright 2005 Booklist