The Complete Peanuts 1973-1974

The twelfth volume of Peanuts features a number of tennis strips and several extended sequences involving Peppermint Patty's friend Marcie (including a riotous, rarely seen sequence in which Marcie's costume-making and hairstyling skills utterly spoil a skating competition for PP), so it seems only right that this volume's introduction should be served up by Schulz's longtime friend, tennis champion Billie Jean King.
This volume also picks up on a few loose threads from the previous year, as the mysterious "Poochie" shows up in the flesh; Linus and Lucy's new kid brother "Rerun" makes his first appearance, is almost immediately drafted onto the baseball team (where, thanks to his tiny strike zone, he wins a game), and embarks on his first terrifying journey on the back of his mom's bike; and, in one of Peanuts' oddest recurring storylines, the schoolhouse Sally used to talk to starts talking, or at least thinking, back at her!
The Complete Peanuts 1973-1974 also includes one of the all-time classic Peanuts sequences, in which Charlie Brown's baseball-oriented hallucinations finally manifest themselves in a baseball-shaped rash on his head. Forced to conceal the embarrassing discoloration with a bag worn over his head, Charlie Brown goes to camp as "Mister Sack" and discovers that, shorn of his identity, he's suddenly well liked and successful.

Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google). His ambition from a young age was to be a cartoonist and his first success was selling 17 cartoons to the Saturday Evening Post between 1948 and 1950. He also sold a weekly comic feature called Li'l Folks to the local St. Paul Pioneer Press. After writing and drawing the feature for two years, Schulz asked for a better location in the paper or for daily exposure, as well as a raise. When he was turned down on all three counts, he quit. He started submitting strips to the newspaper syndicates and in the spring of 1950, United Feature Syndicate expressed interest in Li'l Folks. They bought the strip, renaming it Peanuts, a title Schulz always loathed. The first Peanuts daily appeared October 2, 1950; the first Sunday, January 6, 1952. Diagnosed with cancer, Schulz retired from Peanuts at the end of 1999. He died on February 13, 2000, the day before Valentine's Day-and the day before his last strip was published, having completed 17,897 daily and Sunday strips, each and every one fully written, drawn, and lettered entirely by his own hand -- an unmatched achievement in comics.