The AAUGH blog

I’ve learned from some alert and helpful AAUGH blog readers that a few of my recent posts have not been arriving to those who subscribe via email. Notably, the one with animation of the Peanuts characters dancing with Dick Van Dyke and the one announcing a new DVD and noting that Obama was accused of sabotaging A Charlie Brown Christmas failed to arrive.

Now, I know some of you have been reading the AAUGH Blog for many years, all the way back to the days when it was just an email newsletter (and by the way, we’re a little over a month away from the 10th anniversary of that first newsletter), so you may simply be used to and comfortable with getting the blog by mail. But if in the meantime you’ve started using an RSS reader or a blog consolidation service for reading other blogs, you may want to add the AAUGH Blog to that. Head on over to the blog’s home page for the RSS link and links for many popular feed services – you’ll find them in the right-hand side column.

And thank you for reading.

Obviously, if I can figure out the problem here, and fix it, I shall.

I just added this book to the presumably-prestigious, yet under-organized, AAUGH.com reference library.

Sniffy the Pup, issue 8

“But the infamous AAUGH.com reference library is focused on Schulz and Peanuts!” I hear you cry. “What could this comic book have to do with that?”

I’m actually curious how many folks know the answer – if you do, email me at questions@aaugh.com. I’ll pick one answer (through some means; may be most-right, first-right, favorite-answer-regardless-of-whether-it’s-right, or utterly random), and give the submitter their choice of one of the following About Comics products:

• Schulz’s Youth
• It’s Only a Game
• You’ll All Be Sorry!
• The Licensable BearTM Big Book of Officially Licensed Fun! (I wrote that’n, and will autograph it if you want.)

Decision of the judge is final. Prize is for US entrants only, due to shipping costs (but feel free to submit your answer anyway.) I assume the right to publish any answer, regardless of whether it wins the prize. Entry cuts off a little before I post the answer, which will be Monday or Tuesday. Prize value is less than $20, so please don’t hassle me on the details.

Meanwhile, Amazon is already offering Cyber Monday specials… on Sunday. Have they (sniff) forgotten the true meaning of Cyber Monday?? Oh, what has this civilization stopped to?

The young-folked-aimed biography that I mentioned a while back as being called Drawing Funny Pictures: The Life and Times of Charles M. Schulz is now going to be titled Sparky: The Life and Times of Charles M. Schulz, and the release date has been moved up to April.

And as long as I’m posting something, it’s time for my annual “on buying gifts” message.

First off, the gift is not important. Caring is important. The gift is at best a symbol. Don’t stress over it.

Times are tough. If you can’t afford to give, don’t. If you can afford to give, and can’t think of anything, give a gift to an appropriate charity. If your friends are lucky, giving to their nearby food bank may not help them directly, but to the degree that it helps their environs, it will indirectly help them.

But if you are going to be buying physical objects, buying online is a good way to go – particularly if your buying gifts for folks are not nearby. Often, the added discount of buying online is balanced out by the cost of shipping – but if you’d have to ship it anyway, having the gift shipped direct to its destination helps out, and saves you from standing in line at the post office. We’re probably going to fly out to see some relatives for the holidays, and rather than toting gifts through the airport (especially with today’s added baggage fees, yipe!), we’ll have them shipped right to the relatives and wrap ‘em when we get there.

And if you’re gonna buy through Amazon… please come to this blog first. If you click through on one of the product links in the blog on your way to Amazon, they’ll credit AAUGH.com for everything you buy. It doesn’t cost you a cent more, and the money that generates helps to justify all the time I spend on the blog and the website. When it comes to the question of whether I should buy a certain piece of Peanuts merchandise to write about, it’s far easier to justify saying “yes” knowing that running this blog does generate money.

In the coming days, you’ll be seeing a few extra messages from me. I’m no fool; I want you to have a link in front of you when you’re about to do some online shopping. But I will make it painless. I’ve been saving up a few good posts for the next few days.

So I’m at a Big Buy store yesterday, and notice that they don’t have the new edition of I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown on their new release rack. So out of curiosity, I head over to their children’s section to see if it’s there, and I find a couple people standing there, talking about the placement of Peanuts and some other material. I reach by them, because I wanted to take a look at the packaging of the collection of 1960s specials. When I put it back, one of the people talking said “you sure you want to put that back?”

Turns out, she’s someone in quite a respectable position at the Warner Brothers video sales department, specifically dealing with the Peanuts franchise and similar lines. (Yup, that’s one of the things that keeps life in the Los Angeles area interesting – you run into the people behind things.) And she explained that while the DVD was released earlier this week, many of the chains had decided not to put it out until closer to the Christmas season. She reeled off a bunch of specific chains and expected release windows… but the sum of it all is that if you want to get your copy now, you’re likely not to find it in your local store. But of course you can get it now here.

She was also helpful in making sure that I got my comp copy for appearing in the disk’s extras, even though I’ve relocated. Which brings me to my next point: the new FTC rules. Here in the US, the government is warning that they’re going to crack down on bloggers who don’t make it clear that their opinions on products may have been bribed for via free product provided by publishers. I think I’ve always been up front about things here, but just to make sure I’ve got my t’s dotted and my i’s crossed, let me point out:

• I don’t sell my opinion.
• I do make money from most (not all) of the product links I post here – specifically, links to Amazon, Amazon UK (but not Amazon Japan, Germany, or Canada), Bookcloseouts, Sideshow, and I think I’ve got Barnes&Noble working again. If you click through those links and order something – even if it’s not the product I link to – I get a small cut. Even with that, however, I’d like to think my record shows that I’m not skewing my opinion, and that I’m willing to tell you when I don’t like a given book.
• I do get free stuff from time to time. I get all the Complete Peanuts volumes, although I think that’s more as reward for helping them find some strips (more on the early volumes than recently, but even recently I’ve helped them find better source) than for my blogger status. I got a review copy. I got a couple comp copies of You’re a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, but that arose from me being on the documentary featurette (and is, I should note, the only “pay” I get for these featurettes).  I got a case of the 2010 Charles Schulz on Life calendar, but that’s from my business dealings in securing the relevant licenses for them and providing them with the art files…. and most of those copies were forwarded on to the copyright holders of the cartoons and to the Schulz family. I got free review copies of Schulz and Peanuts and Charles M. Schulz: Cartoonist and Creator of Peanuts.There was one shipment of books from Ballantine books, but I can’t remember exactly what; the only thing I recall was the dustjacket -but just the dustjacket – for A Peanuts Christmas. That’s all that I remember getting from publishers and producers. (There’s been a few small items that AAUGH Blog readers have sent me as thank yous.)
• There are some Peanuts-related business dealings in the works for me, some of which my not pan out, and one of which is with an existing publisher of Peanuts material, whose work I’ve discussed in the past. I am not at liberty to announce everything that I’m working on, but I shall try to flag when there might be a conflict.
• I don’t think I’ve hidden the fact that I’m the publisher of Schulz’s Youth and It’s Only a Game, and thus make money off of every copy sold.

And as long as I’m doing a rambling post, in case there are any general comics fans here, here’s some oddly-high-discount items currently available through Amazon.

• The Amazing Spider-Man Pop-up: 86% off, $2.77
• M (adapting the classic movie; hardcover, Jon J Muth) 67% off, $8.33
• Chance in Hell (Gilbert Hernandez) -  84% off, $2.78
• Oh Skin-nay! The Days of Real Sport – 77% off, $5.66
• Twisted Journeys 1: Captured by Pirates – 89% off (of a hardcover price that you’d never pay, but the end result is a cheap kids GN – $3.21)
• Fantastic 4 Color & Activity Book with Tattoos – 75% off, and part of a the buy-3-get-1 deal. At 76 cents, it might be handy for pushing an order over the $25 free shipping minimum.

AAUGH Blog reader Mark points us to this unique Charlie Brown Christmas item that’s on eBay, in a sale ending in just a few hours: an (apparently) actual script for A Charlie Brown Christmas that was used for rewrites, paste-ups, and the like. At $2500 Buy It Now, this is not something that would likely end up in the AAUGH.com Reference Library even if we weren’t about to incur signficant relocation expenses. Of course, if someone wanted to buy it and donate it to the AAUGH.com Reference library, I’m sure we’d appreciate it… but I bet the Schulz Museum would appreciate the donation even more.

And that leads me to my next topic: yes, the AAUGH.com Reference Library is relocating. Now, since the library is not generaly open to the public, this would not seem to have much impact on anyone but me. However, it does mean that for about a month, the books will all be in boxes, so those of you who like sending me quick questions are apt not to get the usual quick answers until the library is relocated and reorganized. But by this time ext month, we should be ou of our Southern California location… and into another Southern California location, about 10 miles away!

Play It Again, Schroeder! is now shipping. Nicely, this is not a Schroeder-themed strip collection; it’s a music-themed collection. That means that it’s still Schroeder-heavy, of course, but not to the degree that they had to scrape up every Schroeder strip out there (in contrast to the recent Pig-Pen-themed collection). And there’s plenty of fine strips… plus, because music was such a prevalent theme in Peanuts, there’s only a couple places where they stoop to pulling a couple strips out of the midst of a generally non-music storyline. Because the strips are shown in sequence, there is clustering of themed strips – toward the end, there’s a lot of strips about Peppermint Patty and Marcie at the Tiny Tots concerts, for example, and a lot of strips in which a musical staff is physically interacted with.
(None of this is to suggest that a purely Schroeder-themed collection couldn’t be good; there’s a sweet Italian Lucy-and-Schroeder-at-the-piano collection I always liked. But that’s a much shorter book; this one has 326 strips, which would be a bit much for any one thing.)

Also arrived is the new board book version of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The writing makes a good 10-page summary of the classic TV special, and the adaptation of Schulz art to tell the tale is pretty well done (if over-colored; shadowing under the chin makes a lot of characters look like they need a shave, or perhaps have hobo smudges.) It won’t replace actually seeing the special, and all the humor disappears when shortened to this degree, but for what it is, it’s a good job.

Now, when you’re Mr. AAUGH.com, people expect you to know everything about Peanuts books. And when you’re Mrs. Mr. AAUGH.com, you’re expected mainly to just nod in understanding amusement when Mr. AAUGH.com is just spilling all his knowledge out in front of you for no particular reason. But it doesn’t always work that way. Y’see, on eBay a couple weeks back, I spotted a Peanuts cloth book that I’d never seen before, something called Snoopy’s Travels. I didn’t recognize it, and couldn’t find any reference to it out there, so of course I bought it. And when it arrived, I stared at it, and its lack of any copyright notice or publisher mark that would explain the source of this baby’s book of pictures of Snoopy traveling in France, Italy, England, and Holland. And then Mrs. Mr. AAUGH.com came home, saw it sitting on the table, and said “oh, you got one of those!” She’d seen this, or something like it, at a crafts store — it was a make-your-own cloth book kit. Ah, knowledge comes from so many places..

Also added to the AAUGH.com library is the only Easton Press edition in there so far. Easton Press, as some of you know, puts out leather-bound, gilt-edged editions of many books, including various Peanuts books. It’s nicely put together in some ways – the cover feels solid, the end papers are nice, but about the only thing that actually improves the experience of reading it is the bound-in ribbon you can use as a bookmark. It’s more a gift-to-impress than a real better practical experience. One minor note for the hardcore among us: on the spine, it says “By Charles Schulz” – and off the top of my head, I can’t recall any other Peanuts book that does so. it’s either by simply “Schulz” or by “Charles M. Schulz”.
With as much money as I sink into Peanuts books, I’m glad I got this used, and don’t think I’ll be chasing after completing my collection of Easton Press editions soon; at the moment, I can go to the publisher’s website (they don’t sell through stores) and order 10 Peanuts books for about $800. Ouch!

Well, this was a bit of a rambling post, so as long as I’ve got you, I might as well note that we’ve stared to take advertising here on The AAUGH Blog. No, I’m not selling you space in the blog entries themselves, but along the edges… and at this point, you can buy a small ad for about a penny a day (in fact, I think there are still some free ads available.) Go here for more info.