The history of Peanuts can be measured through the gradual development and simplification of Charles Schulz's style and technique. These early strips are almost cluttered in comparison to the Spartan scarcity of later years. Refinement, for Schulz, went hand-in-hand with abbreviation, and as the years passed the strip's vocabulary grew increasingly sophisticated through the process of subtraction - saying as much as possible with the least expression.

But here we see Schulz still in his formative years, with a keen eye for the details of composition and narrative already formed. Despite his popularity, Schulz enjoys the reputation as something of a "cartoonist's cartoonist", and it's not hard to see why: Peanuts works as well as it does because many of the complex mechanical techniques which compose the backbone of the strip are for all intents and purposes invisible to the lay reader. In Schulz's work we see the origins of some of our very best modern cartoonists' preoccupation with streamlined narrative.

It's hard to find strips where the characters' size and position in relation to the panel change significantly. Many of the more elaborate techniques common to cartoonists throughout history are alien to Schulz's unerringly organic construction. Close-ups, silhouettes, and cut-away shots are almost totally unknown in the Peanuts cosmos. The consistent representation of a character throughout multiple panels allows Schulz to wrest the maximum utility out of slight physical changes in body language or facial expression. The attention paid to proportional consistency and (comparatively) naturalistic movement as the basis for expression can be seen in the work of Chris Ware and Dan Clowes, just to name two.

While this volume sees Schulz's trademark laconic delivery finally beginning to solidify, it is also notable for the presence of other elements which would prove to be less enduring. As has been noted, adults make an appearance during the odd Sunday-only series featuring Lucy's Michelle Wie-ish career as a golf prodigy. That same sequence also features some well-delineated landscape shots, rendered in exquisite detail and complete with long-scale crowd scenes. While these types of adventures and scenarios may seem uncharacteristic for the typically mundane Peanuts mythos, they are proof, for any who doubted, that Schulz was as fine a draftsman as any of his more flashy peers. As this volume makes readily apparent, however, he still had a long way to go before alighting on the sublime simplicity of his middle and later periods.