The AAUGH blog

If you’re one of those folks lucky enough to have tickets for the sold-out San Diego Comic-Con next weekend, you’re in for an interesting treat

• Saturday, 4:45-5:45 PM: It’s a Great Comic-Con, Charlie Brown— Together for the first time at Comic-Con, Warner Home Video, United Media and the Schulz Estate bring you a Peanuts voice cast reunion in celebration of several great holiday DVD releases this September and October. Featuring Chris DeFaria (Peppermint Patty), Gabrielle DeFaria Ritter (Pigpen), Lisa DeFaria (Peppermint Patty), Sally Dryer (Violet and Lucy), Robin Kohn Glazer (Lucy), Jason Mendelson, Hilary Momberger (Sally), executive producer Lee Mendelson, and Jeannie Schulz, the wife of Charles M. Schulz. Room 6A

Plus, there will be a Peanuts booth on the sales floor again, as usual selling some limited-edition made-for-the-con goods: Peanuts lanyards, a Charlie Brown bobblehead based on the very first Charlie Brown figure, and  shirts featuring Lucy (for the girls), Linus (for the boys) and Snoopy (for the unisex among us.) Production runs of all these items are in the 300-600 range. Pictures available here.

I’ll be at the con, but as I don’t have a booth this year and have no panels scheduled, I won’t be easy to find. If you’re going to be there and have something you want to talk to me about, drop me a line at questions@AAUGH.com now, and we’ll see what can be set up.

The upcoming A Treasury of Happiness, collecting the material from the eight Happiness Is A Warm Puppy-style gift books, has been delayed until November (from its previous slated August release.)

Just shipped from Fukuoka to the AAUGH.com reference library is a Peanuts kanji (Japanese handwriting) workbook. Well, it’s kind of Peanuts. There are Peanuts chracters on the cover, and along the edges of 5 of the 88 interior pages. That’s not to say that there aren’t cartoon characters throughout the book; there are, on virtually every page. It’s just that they aren’t Peanuts characters, but characters like the girl with mittens that you see in the picture of the inside front cover.

I don’t know if this is because they could not easily get Peanuts art that showed the words that they wanted to illustrate, or if they simply took the guts of an existing workbook and quicky added a few Peanuts decorations to make it a Peanuts book.

It’s published by, umm, these guys. (Okay so I neither read, nor write, nor type Japanese. I’m not going to get much practical use out of this book. Even if I learn to write Japanese, I still won’t know what I’m writing!)

I’ve just added two more books to the AAUGH.com reference library, neither one of them new. One is the second edition of Jan Lindenberger’s Unauthorized Guide to Snoopy Collectibles from 1998. It’s a book of pictures of Snoopy stuff, of course. Books like this always remind me of the great variation of accuracy in the various stuffed Snoopys done over the years. I don’t care about having the price-estimates, but I do like one thing in this used copy: its inscription. There are times when buying a used book when you want it to be immaculate, but there are also times when it’s nice to feel that the book had its own life, its own history. In this case, someone named Erik saw the book, and it made him think of Nancy, a woman he gave it to with love.

The other book is Deciding for Myself, a junior high textbook published by the Anglican Church of Canada in 1966. There’s a half dozen of the cartoons that Schulz did for the Church of God’s Youth magazine scattered in between stories. Schulz is credited twice… and his name is misspelled both times (”Charles Schultz” on the title page, “Charles M. Schultz” on the copyright page.) Remember that strip where Charlie Brown finally wins a trophy, and his name is misspelled on it? I have a feeling that Schulz knew that one from plenty of experience.

January brings us a new Peanuts kiddie book (presumably a board book, given the page count and price): The Easter Beagle Egg Hunt.

If you think the upcoming book list is looking pretty empty between Complete Peanuts volumes, I agree. But worry not, there are other books for the serious Schulz fan in the works

A couple years back, a talented one-time collaborator of mine named Adam Rex came out with a children’s book of humorous poems about monsters, called Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. I meant to blog about that here not only because the book was very funny (which it was) but because when illustrating a story about the son of dracula going to the dentist, Adam clearly designed his characters as a parody of the Peanuts gang.

Somehow, I never got around to that blog entry, but my failure doesn’t seem to have held the book back; it hit the New York Times best-seller list.

I ran into Adam at BookExpo America last week, and was lucky enough to glom a copy of the upcoming sequel, Frankenstein Takes the Cake. Good stuff, of course. And he revisits Dracula Jr., and this time the visuals are a parody of a Peanuts Sunday strip.

(By the way, that link up there for the first book? It’s to remaindered copies a mere $5.99 apiece. A recommended bargain.)