Complete Peanuts 25

So I have, in my hot’n’handsome li’l hands, a copy of The Complete Peanuts volume 25, collecting the final year-and-a-little of the newspaper strip, which is a good thing to have but not exactly hard to have come by before. But this is filled out with two other items of note: a foreword by President of the United States Barack Obama – just a basic one-page statement of I like Peanuts and everybody like Peanuts and Peanuts holds meaning, that’s the kind of thing one gets from a sitting president, but still, hey, sitting president! – and the complete run of “Li’l Folks”, the series of single panel kid-oriented gags that Schulz did for local papers in the day before “Peanuts”. Those haven’t been available before in a generally distributed book (although there is a collection available from the Schulz Museum, which has the added bonus of commentary by Derrick Bang). The Complete Peanuts format was well designed for running the daily and Sunday Peanuts strips that the books have consisted of up until this point, but it’s a horribly horizontal format for a the portrait-oriented “Li’l Folks” and so Fantagraphics has done this:

Sideways Complete Peanuts

As myself a publisher of a book where the binding is at the top, I approve! And this may well be what ends up happening to some of the material that’s going to end up in Complete Peanuts 26, such as a the comic book stories.

Speaking of Complete Peanuts 26, I suppose I should caveat this coverage/review of 25 by saying that I have been paid for my work on that volume, and thus you should read my comments here with the awareness that I may have a conflict of interest. But then, my reviews of previous volumes should reflect that I feel that of course you should want all the Complete Peanuts volumes, because, hey, it’s the complete “Peanuts”! Go order it now (you still can get some good pre-shipping savings!)

Classic finds
English Phrases to Comfort Your Heart

The next book in my Amazon Japan shipment falls into the adorable category of “Peanuts used to explain American culture”. English Phrases to Comfort Your Heart with Snoopy by Nobu Yamada falls into that category. It also falls into the category of “books which are meant to be destroyed”, as each …

New releases
Look! A mook!

Mooks – that is, items with magazine-like content but sold more like a book – are popular in Japan. Many of them come bundled with extra items, and there have been a fair number with Peanuts items. Most often these are bags – a handbag or a tote of some …

New releases
Bringing up the rear

I’m interrupting my coverage of the shipment of books I got from Japan to cover another foreign book that just arrived. Now, I don’t try to collect every foreign Peanuts book. My collection is out of control as it is. I try to find books in languages that I don’t …