Lucy, the book

Catching up on recent purchases, we have Lucy, a hardcover collection of Lucy-centric stories from the Boom! comic books – so if you have all the comic books, or all the trade paperback collections thereof, then you have all this stuff. But it is a collection with a lot of good artists in it – Vicki Scott, Robert Pope, Stephanie Gladden, Scott Jeralds, and so forth. Some of the usual suspects on the writing list… but not me.

(That’s not a complaint. I was curious whether one of my comic book tales would end up in one of these hardcover books. So far, none of them have wound up in the Charlie Brown, Snoopy, or Lucy volumes. The next volume up is Linus, and none of the ten stories I wrote are good candidates for that. Will there be more volumes after that? None have been announced yet… and given that Kaboom! has said that they plan to cut back the number of items they publish by 15% this year, that casts just that much more doubt on not only this set, but on whether there’s a second volume of reprints of the 20th century Peanuts comic books.)

This might make a good gift for the Lucy fan in your life, but if you’re just a general Peanuts fan, it makes more sense to go with the paperback collections of the comic book series.

New releases
A pop-up shows up

Here Comes Charlie Brown!: A Peanuts Pop-up, Gene Kannenberg, Jr.’s adaptation of the very first Peanuts strip, is not the first Peanuts book to reprint only a single strip. There was at least one board book that did much the same thing. However, that board book was, at heart, a …

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 …