The unvoiced thoughts of Snoopy have made him constant cultural everyman – and all the more heart-warming for being everydog – for children and adults alike, since his appearance in the fifties. His serious-mindedness, overthinking, and quiet existential angst shared by owner and friend Charlie Brown, along with Lucy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang, keep these children as ageless today as they were intended then: Peanuts is a comedy of manners as much as it is a lightly surreal cartoon that can be empathised with across the generations. Often reimagined yet always utterly recognisable over each decade’s incarnations, although sometimes experimenting with animal sounds for Snoopy and Woodstock, Peanuts has always been at its strongest when Snoopy doesn’t need a voice for Charlie Brown to understand him, which is as starkly clear and articulate as the expressions of its characters in Titan Comics’ rerelease of Snoopy, Come Home.

First published in 1962, this facsimile edition of the thirteenth Peanuts collection is a ‘best of’ anthology of the daily cartoon strips that appeared from 1955 to 1962. If the occasional cultural reference needs looking up – and that really is going to be occasional – those moments can’t hope to outnumber the ‘mea culpa’ moments every reader of every age will enjoy, whether they (or their parents) were born when Snoopy or his human entourage first said or thought them or not. The plot of potential peril for Snoopy’s doghouse, though it does the job of giving a throughline to the cartoon strips, is not the point of the book and doesn’t really pretend to be: the success of Peanuts is that we still see our all-too-human nature in Snoopy’s sense of his own underappreciation by those around him, his unrealised potential (as an explorer… philosopher… cat…) and his own excuses for not living up to it – along with his capacity and need for love and reassurance.

Best of all, you don’t need to have followed the films, books, or TV series to enjoy picking up Peanuts at whatever point you come in, least of all here. Charles Shultz captured a fundamental recipe of human self-awareness and self-doubt with his children and animals, hence the reinventions never feeling like reinventions but honest continuation. The unvoiced pettiness and self-aware heroism of the everyday, the thinness of the line between familial love and all-out war, the selfish motivations of even the best of friends are as true, sweet, sad and funny as they ever were, because we, people, are as good intentioned and yet neurotic as we ever were too – and long may Snoopy’s stay-at-home heroism be recognisable and endearing as it remains today.