You're Taking Care of Business, Charlie Brown

When I first seriously got into comics in the late 1980s, I pretty much took a crash course in the medium's history by poring over every issue of Amazing Heroes and The Comics Journal I could find, while Honk! kept me filled in on the funny stuff. The company that published all those magazines, Fantagraphics, also put out a slew of great indie comics and reprints of classic newspaper strips, but as a Seattle Weekly feature on the scrappy publisher, it was almost always surviving on fairly thin margins.

That is, until they landed the rights to put together The Complete Peanuts, about which I've raved here plenty, and which publisher Gary Groth was apparently thinking about as far back as 1998, when United Media sent him a licensing kit:

"It must have weighed a pound," says Groth, "and it had introductory material about what we're getting into—and tons of things to fill out. Peanuts is a global phenomenon. They probably get requests all the time. They had a lot of papers to fill out—they wanted to know everything about the project, the advances you were offering. They wanted to determine whether it was financially worth their while—whether you were viable enough to do it, or if your idea was viable. We were putting out a million other fires at the time, and this was intimidating. It seemed like such a long shot; there were other, more urgent things I had to deal with at the time. So I just put it aside."

Fortunately for all of us, he got Fantagraphics' act together and convinced Charles Schulz's widow they were the best people for the job. The second volume of The Complete Peanuts should be out next month.