Complete PEANUTS Now Available Online

As a follow-up to a Peanuts post the other week, I should note that the syndicate has made all the Peanuts strips available online, though they haven’t really publicized it much. There’s no search engine, really (there is a search feature but it only allows you to get all the strips from a particular time period displayed on one page) or tags, so to find a strip, you have to know what day and what year it was published, or just keep clicking on the arrow buttons until you find the strip you’re looking for. The format is:

http://www.comics.com/peanuts/yyyy-mm-dd

So if you type in http://comics.com/peanuts/1976-08-09 , you get the strip from August 9, 1976, where Snoopy writes a book about religion.

The strips aren’t all in the best of condition; as you see from the TV-related strip at the top, they have some missing lines. But they still have the logo in the upper left-hand corner, which the books have eliminated but which I kind of like. (Without the logo, you wonder why the word balloons in the first panel are usually scrunched over to the right.) Anyway, I think it’s great that 50 years of this strip are now available for free, and hope against hope that this might finally hasten the departure of Peanuts reruns from newspapers. Because, as Charlie Brown himself said on June 30, 1962, aka http://comics.com/peanuts/1962-06-30 :