Snoopy: Cowabunga!: A Peanuts Collection
When the Peanuts newspaper strip began its five-decade run, in 1950, good ol’ Charlie Brown was the undisputed focus. But gradually, as his beagle, Snoopy, grew more anthropomorphic and his humanlike thoughts became verbalized in balloons, the insouciant canine became the strip’s most popular character. In this collection, he plays tennis and football, hands out colored eggs as the Easter Beagle, appears as the WWI Flying Ace and BMOC Joe Cool, performs puppet-theater productions for the neighborhood gang, receives countless rejection slips as a frustrated author, and hangs out with his feathered friend Woodstock—all beguilingly depicted in Schulz’s simple, subtle, and sublime drawings. The original black-and-white daily strips benefit from the tasteful addition of color in this volume for kids. If Charlie Brown, with his worries and insecurities, was the character readers were most likely to relate to (and the one who reflected creator Schulz’s own neuroses), Snoopy’s joie de vivre and rich fantasy life make him the perfect aspirational figure for younger readers. Grades 2-7. --Gordon Flagg