It's Only a Game: The Complete Color Collection

In the late 1950s, amidst the surging popularity of Peanuts and during a strongly creative period, Charles M. Schulz created his only other syndicated newspaper comic. It's Only a Game focused on the fun and foibles of people and their pastimes. Schulz targets those who play bridge and those who bowl, little leaguers and horse track regulars, those who rush across the gridiron and those who hunch over the chessboard. This full-color collection offers up the series in its full Sunday format. Commentary and insight are provided by artist and cartoonist Jim Sasseville, who worked with Schulz on the feature.To facilitate the best display of the art, this book is in a special format: the pages flip up like a calendar, rather than to the left like a regular book. For those readers used to the Sunday newspaper funnies, this makes for a familiar and comfortable reading experience.Prepared and published by About Comics.

Between 1957 and 1959, Schulz created a single-panel sports-themed feature that ran three times a week or in a combined package on Sunday. He relied increasingly on Sasseville, who was writing and drawing the Peanuts comic book, to turn sketches and concepts into finished work. However, the fundamental style and attitude remains recognizably Schulz's. The same quality that made Peanuts a modern classic—Schulz's amused fascination with human pretensions and delusions—animates this minor newspaper cartoon. Unlike some contemporary sports cartoons, it focuses on amateur activities such as golf, bowling, Ping-Pong and even bridge. There's no cheering crowd, no huge prize to win. The people playing these games are at least nominally adults, though they look a lot like the Peanuts crew and behave like them, too. If Charlie Brown and his friends worry like adults, Schulz understood how childishly grownups can behave when they hit a bad shot or make a grand slam. Such excessive emotion is nothing to be concerned about, though; that's just the way we are. Schulz clearly enjoyed reminding adults of how silly they can be, as on the cover, where a Little League player reminds a scowling adult umpire that he shouldn't take a game too seriously. If nothing else, this book answers the question of what a grown-up Charlie Brown would have looked like.
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