Book Review: THE COMPLETE PEANUTS, VOLUME 21: 1991-92 by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics Press, 2014)

In this latest collection, Schulz continues to consolidate the aesthetic ground he had regained during 1989 and 1990, when he started to fully exploit the potential that had been opened up by his decision to change to a variable panel format.  This time, however, most of the innovations center on the Sunday strips.  Schulz seems to have realized at some point that the Sunday format was every bit as much a candidate for a shakeup as the dailies.  He subsequently begins to employ far larger Sunday panels than he had ever used before (e.g. the crashing ocean wave of 4/21/91, the Victoria Falls panorama of 4/19/92).  In an even more radical departure, he begins to assume the virtually unprecedented role of an OMYUN (Omniscient Yet Unseen Narrator; (c) Joe Torcivia) and use narrative captions, an early example of which appears in the Victoria Falls Sunday strip.  A daily caption duly follows in the one-panel strip of 8/22/92.  Clearly, an old dog can learn new tricks, whether you feed him cookies (which Snoopy continues to guzzle here as if they're going out of style) or not.

Only one new character is included herein: Cormac, a little boy who meets Charlie Brown at summer camp and subsequently shows up in Sally's class, where he, not very artfully, contrives to interpose himself between Sally and her supposed "Sweet Babboo," Linus.  If subsequent appearances by Cormac will help to drive the by-now-tiresome "I'm not your Sweet Babboo!" six feet underground for good and all, then I'll be eternally grateful to Schulz.  Old routines, such as Snoopy's assaults on Linus' blanket, maintain their position in Schulz' arsenal, while Rerun, who will play a much more significant role later in the decade, begins to pop up once again in late '92.