By Laurel Maury

THIS SPRING HAS been a fine one for reissues of comic strips. Fantagraphics began its reprinting of every "Peanuts" strip ever published. The Complete Peanuts: 1950-1952 is the first of 25 volumes, with the final volume to be published in 2012. For "Peanuts" prehistory, the Charles M. Schulz Museum has released "Li'l Folks," the strip Charles Schulz drew before "Peanuts," in Li'l Folks, Charles M. Schulz: Li'l Beginnings. The latest reissue of George Herriman's strip, Krazy & Ignatz 1931-1932: A Kat a'Lilt with Song, also with Fantagraphics, will be out in June.

The "Peanuts" compendium is coffee-table size in musty, dignified colors. While gorgeous, it doesn't seem right to put "Peanuts" in this sort of literary coffin. Why not sunnier? Fantagraphics is in the business of promoting comics strip as serious art and has come out swinging. So we get Charlie Brown in serious browns.

But Charlie Brown was not serious. He was earnest. He believed in things—such as that Lucy would someday hold the football still so he could kick it. When I read "Peanuts" at length, something inside me says, "Yes, this is us!" only to raise my eyes, find it is no longer us and grieve. It's a jolt to see the suburban vision as nostalgic. When the detritus of the 20th century is collected, sifted and pondered, suburban American childhood will emerge as the utopia we didn't love until it left. And Charlie Brown will remind us.

CHARLES SCHULZ'S PARENTS were poor. They did not push their son, but neither did they discourage him in his dream to be a cartoonist. Like Charlie Brown, Schulz was the son of a barber. As a boy, he would sit in his father's barbershop after school, content to watch the customers. His second wife, Jean Schulz, thinks this is where he began observing how people walk and talk. She believes that because his parents didn't try to make him into anything, his mind was freer than most.

In 1946, Charles "Sparky" Schulz came back from three years at war, grateful to be alive. He'd wanted to be a cartoonist since childhood, and started inking in captions for a Catholic magazine and freelancing where he could. His "Li'l Folks" debuted as a weekly feature in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 22, 1947. It ran in the women's section.

The "Li'l Folks" anthology is a delicious, buttery yellow, a shade paler than Charlie Brown's shirt. A Snoopy-like dog jumps over a checkerboard where two children play. It says, touch me. It looks fun and real. "Li'l Folks" strips are reproduced on the right-hand side, with commentary and comparison with "Peanuts" on the left. The book is a labor of love. It indulges in the knowing inside winks that scholars know to avoid, but I'm glad the Schulz Museum didn't leave it to serious scholars. Sometimes justice requires fans.

"Li'l Folks" has a different quality than "Peanuts." The lines are thicker. Perhaps Schulz was making the best of middling reproduction quality in newspapers, but the lines vary in thickness far more than in "Peanuts." They have more of a "Family Circus" feel. The characters are deliberately cute, though by the end of the strip, they become sparer and begin to resemble those of early "Peanuts."

While late "Li'l Folks" and early "Peanuts" are similar in how they're drawn, "Li'l Folks" never invokes this dead-on gaze. "Peanuts" invokes the dead-on gaze from the start. (The one exception is the "Li'l Folks" character of the unnamed, angry infant.) The "Li'l Folks" kids are in the lower half of the frame. We look down on them. They're children to us. Cute. Occasionally precocious with social commentary. Often "glad-they're-not-mine" kids. They are ours—but they are not us.

The one character in "Peanuts" who looks most like a "Li'l Folks" kid is Lucy when she first appears. She starts as a toddler whose antics bedevil the others, especially Charlie Brown. Her eyes are blank. She gets some good jokes, most notably when she eats Charlie Brown's records (a joke that first appeared in "Li'l Folks") and then offers him some.

The only character who resembles the Charlie Brown we know is the unnamed infant, who loudly protests being put in a playpen: "Lemme out of here! I'm innocent, I tell ya!... I demand to see the warden." It's rather a bit of genius to see middle-class childhood as a prison, an idea that would gain currency 20 years later. Schulz's angry infant first appears on February 1, 1948. He acts like a trapped, angry everyman, a figure that resonates with Brecht, then newly popular in America.

"Li'l Folks" is also the first place Charlie Brown appears: May 30, 1948. If you want to know Charlie Brown's birthday, that's it. In our first view of him, he's wearing a WWII sergeant's cap and shaking hands with a dog. The Charlie Brown of "Peanuts" started out as a bit of a bully who quickly becomes far more hapless. One of the joys of "Li'l Folks" is that it allows you to see how "Peanuts" was truly a post-war strip. With its mix of cliches and cuteness, "Li'l Folks" shows us how our grandfathers saw middle-class prosperity when it was wondrous and new. In "Peanuts," middle-class life is like those spare Schulz backgrounds, timeless, absolutely necessary and barely noticed.