I now have received all three of the new Be books.
Two of these, Be Brave and Be Kind
, are matched books. They’re gift books, small but not miniature, each 72 pages of strong bright white paper. One each spread (and occasionally on a single page) is a command to be something (“Be sensitive”, “Be endearing”, “Be professional”) paired with a color Peanuts image and often (but not always) a quote from the strip, demonstrating the command at work. The art is Schulz-based work by the inside team at Creative Associates, whose work you would recognize from the Kaboom comic books: pencils by Vicki Scott, inks by Paige Braddock, colors by Alexis Fajardo. The quotes are well chosen. These are not the books to introduce anyone to Peanuts, but they should do the job of being a nice little gift item for folks who know the characters – which would be most people, I reckon. More books are planned in this series; I wonder if they will run short on things to “be”.
Be Yourself is aimed at kids (where the other two books are put out by “Running Press”, this is put out by “Running Press Kids”), and is a larger square hardback book, 40 pages (plus a couple pages of stickers), full color on slick paper. It features Tom Brannon’s Peanuts art – if you’ve seen some of the recent book adaptations of classic Peanuts specials, you’ve seen his highly-modeled colorings of the characters. This book also tells you to “Be” something (such as “a friend” or “determined”), and then will demonstrate that with Peanuts images and, at times, explanations of that image (“Be a friend” has “Friends like Snoopy come to the rescue” as he patches up Woodstock’s birdhouse, and “Marcie counts on her friend Peppermint Patty in tough situations”.) Again, I think that the reader will have to be familiar with the Peanuts milieu to get anything out of it, and given the younger targeting of the book, that’s less of a sure thing. But if you like the Tom Brannon look, here’s a couple dozen images of it, plus fifteen stickers of those images!
