Charlie Brown and the Gang Take Shape Part of an occasional series on vintage comics. "Peanuts Every Sunday: 1952-1955" is as fascinating to read as watching an image emerge during a gravestone rubbing. Shadows and portents slowly rise on the paper, hinting at what the final work will look like. Published by Fantagraphics in December, the book reprints in full color the first four years of Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" strips on Sundays and complements the same publisher's essential "Complete Peanuts" project. The next volume, 1991-1992, is scheduled for April. The comics here, large and dipped in warm, spirited colors, reek of childhood Sunday mornings. They're the perfect riffling side dish to blueberry pancakes and bacon. As the book opens, most of the characters look generic, as if plucked from some 1930s kids" strip. Their heads are so big you wonder how they manage not to tip over, and the strip is populated by characters who would eventually fade away: Shermy, Violet, Patty (the demure, non-Peppermint one). Charlie Brown's personality isn't yet defined - he might even be a wiseacre; Lucy is a blank-eyed zombie toddler; Linus is a baby; and Snoopy is a pointy-snouted pup who shows few signs of becoming a regal philosopher-beagle. By 1955, though, "Peanuts" is assuming its classic shape, well on its way to being one of the best comic strips of the 20th century. The gang's bodies have caught up with their heads, and Schulz's line is more clear and delicate, the panels less cluttered. Snoopy, ganglier and slyer, establishes himself as the strip's real wise guy. Lucy's fussbudget immortality looms. And good ol" Charlie Brown has fully become the gloomy doormat of the funny pages. In his afterword, Gary Groth, Fantagraphics" publisher, writes of Schulz and "Peanuts": "It was an anomaly on the comics page - a comic strip about the interior crises of the cartoonist himself." It is tempting to psychoanalyze Schulz (1922-2000) through his art. He was the son of a barber who came of age during the Great Depression, then served in World War II, and he often felt undervalued and underappreciated. A sense of that resentment bubbles up in the earliest strips. In one case, Lucy, who's being chased by the neighborhood kids after kicking Schroeder's piano, Violet's stamp collection and Shermy's marbles, says, "I'm frustrated and inhibited, and nobody understands me." There's lots of yelling and scowling early on that is more internalized by the end of the book, where there are more sighs and frowns. But these strips aren't all about emotion. There are many small touches that show Schulz's love for and mastery of the medium. The care he takes with the inky blacks of Violet's hair and Snoopy's ears are straight out of the cartoonist's playbook of Milton Caniff ("Terry and the Pirates," "Steve Canyon"). And the skill he shows in drawing the pitching of a baseball, the swinging of a bat and the kicking of a football proves he would have been a fine sports cartoonist if he had wanted. And already in "Peanuts Every Sunday," Schulz unveils and revels in some of the themes and bits that would serve him for decades to come: Linus's security blanket; Lucy's unrequited crush on the piano-plinking Schroeder; Charlie Brown's skirmishes with kites. My favorite visual gag is that of Charlie Brown standing alone on a baseball field in a downpour, beseeching his teammates not to desert him . . . as his baseball glove floats away. In this one lonesome image, a clearer image of "Peanuts," its creator, and its future emerges.