[For] the true Peanuts fan, accustomed to the more functionally proportioned soft-cover collections, the giant Peanuts Jubilee is a bit much. However, its creator, Charles Schulz, in his modestly phrased text, lets us know that, one, he doesn't much care for the title "Peanuts," wished upon his strip by syndicate biggies; and, two, he dislikes the strip's small format—so, bigness may be important for Schulz.

Peanuts graphics are in the classic American cartoon tradition, to which the Disney atelier contributed not only its Parthenon frieze but its Arch of Constantine as well. This simple, laconic manner, a world removed from the late-'30s baroque of Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff …, was not drawn into the mainstream of American visual culture through the instrument of High Pop Art. Peanuts, like Disney, is too much the creation of our heartland; its fantasies are domestic, excluding the foreign or exotic...