Agreed about the breakaway from the four-panel format (which occurred in the late ‘80s). Schulz also began posing characters in ways he had rarely if ever done before, and experimented with different gradients and more detailed backdrops. The tradeoff was the increasing scratchiness of his art, which was down at least…

For a counterpoint, track down THE COMICS JOURNAL #242, which contains a long piece that’s nominally a review of a then-recent Peanuts collection (PEANUTS 2000) but amounts to an extended defense of the strip’s last decade, the author conceding that the ‘80s were pretty bad but that the ‘90s were far from “more of the…