Classic sports-themed strips from the most beloved newspaper comic of all time! Baseball, football, ice hockey and more, all from the pen of Charles M. Schulz, in a handsome box set of four hardcover compilations.
Charlie Brown on the baseball mound. Lucy pulling away the football. Woodstock driving a Zamboni. Snoopy's side-hustle tennis career. Charles M. Schulz, creator of the most beloved comic strip of all time, saw sports as an essential part of American society, and an endless inspiration for both simple fun and opportunities to reveal and test character... just as they are in real life. The comic strips that resulted are some of the most iconic images in comics history!
Gathered here in a gorgeous four-book hardcover box set are the best of Schulz's sporting-themed strips and sequences, compiled from over fifty years of daily Peanuts cartoons. Themed volumes compile the works pastime by pastime – baseball of course, but football, golf, tennis, basketball, ice skating and hockey are all represented among the four volumes. Team celebrations, personal struggles, solidarity in defeat, joy in play, and pure whimsy - the Peanuts cast of children (plus a dog and a bird) experience them across these 800 pages, more than a few of which ask that age old question: will Lucy ever let Charlie kick that football?
The perfect gift set for the classic comics fan who loves sports, the sports fan who loves Peanuts... or who doesn't yet know that they do. Just in time for summer and Father's Day - play ball!
Black-and-white illustrations throughout
Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google). His ambition from a young age was to be a cartoonist and his first success was selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post between 1948 and 1950. He also sold a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit.
He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates and in the spring of 1950, United Feature Syndicate expressed interest in Li'l Folks. They bought the strip, renaming it Peanuts, a title Schulz always loathed. The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952. Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day-and the day before his last strip was published, having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand ― an unmatched achievement in comics.
