Nun cartoons

This is a non-Peanuts post, but I’ve been working on a project which has some overlap in interest, so I thought I’d bring it up.

A little while ago, I posted a 1950s cartoon with a nun teaching some native Americans, one of whom was dressed akin to Charlie Brown, and you might have wondered what I was working on. It was a publishing project that came to a head this past weekend when I released seven books filled with nuns cartoons from the 1950s, all by the cartoonists for the Catholic magazine Extension. One book, Two Little Nuns, is by Bill O’Malley (who would go on to do three other books of nun cartoons for other publishers, after leaving Extension – and if you got my Great Golf Gags book, you’ve seen some of this other work), while the other six are the work of Navy veteran and Chicago fireman Joe Lane. Five of the Lane books (More Little Nuns, Our Little Nuns, Nuns So Lovable, Vale of Dears, and Yes, Sister! No, Sister!) The final book, Nun Funnies!, collects most of the Lane cartoons from those five books plus some other ones. (When Lane did cartoons about nuns on mission in Africa or among the Native Americans, he did some depictions that would rightly be understood today as racially insensitive. I left those out of the bigger collection – so if you’re looking for the full history of such things, get the little books, but if you’re looking for pure entertainment, go for Nun Funnies!, which has more cartoons than all of the five other books combined, but costs less than two of them.)

Now shipping
If you love Schulz, but English, not so much…

Just out in Japan is the Japanese edition of Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects, the Eisner Award-winning, Schulz Museum-published heavily illustrated book co-written by curator Benjamin L. Clark and myself! And yes, it can be shipped to the States… although it …

A Charlie Brown Christmas
A quote unquote requote book on A Charlie Brown Christmas

How can you tell that the new book “A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Timeless Tale of Joy and Meaning”: Unwrapping the True Spirit of the Holiday Season with Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the Peanuts Gang” is truly an innovative work? It’s the quotation marks in the title.  Not constrained by …

General
Spot the Dog

I publish things. I also research things. And really, the two efforts are often one and the same: I research stuff and find that it’s worth publishing; I publish stuff and in the process I’m doing research. That all just happened for me with a syndicated comics panel called “Spot” …