Every now and then, some things happen that make you take note and remember when you have one of those why-does-everything-always-not-go-well -moments. Fantagraphics books are printing all the Peanuts comics in the existence. They have been for a few years actually, but only last year those books started to appear in Finnish. The pace is two books per year, with each book containing two years of comics. Even at this pace it will take 10 years to reprint them all. This pace is much more moderate in Finnish though, one book last year and so far, one book this year. Impatient as I am, I have opted to collect the originals.

I have been a friend of the Peanuts for a long time. At some point I noticed that the pocket books they were printing here in Finland didn’t contain all of the strips, not to mention none of the Sundays either. The existence of which I didn’t come to learn until much later.

Therefore I find it a priviledge to get to read all of the strips in order, to get to see Snoopys transformation from a yipping dog to an “internationally renowned hockey-player” and “the first beagle on the moon”. Not to mention how ‘the bird’ turns into ‘Woodstock’ and how Lucy cultivates her bitchness and how the whole universe of Peanuts builds up. I also enjoy reading about Charles M. Schultz himself.

There’s far too little of Complete anything in the universe. Especially in comics. The works of Carl Barks are re-printed in dozens of different packages and when they do reprint the whole of it, the print is limited. But as I implied at first, I feel I am lucky to exist in the same universe as the Complete Peanuts.