The AAUGH blog

The Complete Peanuts volume 14 (1977-1978) is now available for immediate shipping from Amazon.

Which is actually kind of frustrating for me because my usual comp copy has not yet arrived. So now I have to figure out if it’s just running late (in which case I must be patient), or its gone missing (in which case I’ve got to buy a copy), or if I’ve been dropped from the comp list (I was on in the beginning because I was helping find source for strips that were missing or didn’t have adequate source), but they’ve haven’t needed me in a while) and will thus have to start buying them all….

What I’m saying in: my review of this will be later than usual. But you shouldn’t need a review to want this!

Hallmark edition

Last year I took a look at a “Special Hallmark Edition” book adaptation of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. As I theorized then, this year’s Running Press edition appears to be the same adaptation, but with some of the differences which we saw between the Hallmark and Running Press editions of A Charlie Brown Christmas - the Running Press edition is larger, and has a larger (and in this case different) cover image.

As to whether there’s any change in the art, or if there is better paper as there was for the Christmas book, I really cannot say. I’m cheating here, I’m just going off of the info on the Amazon entry for the book. While the book is now shipping, I try to buy every Peanuts book, but not every edition. (And by the way, don’t bother trying to use Amazon’s Look Inside This Book feature to figure out if it’s using the same art – that feature will pop up a copy of the 2001 paperback edition instead.) When I do get a copy in my hands, I’ll check if there’s any basic change in the art.

Is it just me, or does the Running Press edition star Linus The Raccoon?

The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 is shipping a bit early (no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.)

Life is full, and I haven’t had a chance to complete reading my copy, but I will say that the introduction is probably my favorite of the series thus far. Robert Smigel’s rather acidic work (Triumph the Comic Dog, the Ambiguously Gay Duo) may not strike some as particularly Peanuts-like, but this intro isn’t just a case of “famous person who likes Peanuts” but (as this intro as well as some of his work makes clear) this is a talented someone who takes their Peanuts quite seriously, who was very influenced by and very aware of the work. When he talks about the strip, he’s talking about this specific period, and how it reflects a change from what came before. Kind of nice to see someone like that doing the talking.

Of course you want it. It’s the Complete Peanuts. Go buy.

• My main computer is back home (yay!), and as I promised with my review of the re-release of Peanuts Philosophers, here’s a comparison of the size in the new edition and the old:

Snoopy's philosophy was more expansive in the old days.

• Now shipping (early): My Life with Charlie Brown, where Charles Schulz’s writings about his own life are compiled.
• This year’s It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown airing will be Wednesday, at 8 PM in most US markets. ABC, of course.
• This year’s A Charlie Brown Christmas showing will be, ummmm, in December. Or maybe late November. Folks, it’s March. I doubt they have it figured out yet, nor are they apt to tell me if they did.

Released today:

(And no, I don’t have my copy yet, so I haven’t seen how the documentary featurette came out. I’ll presume I didn’t look too foolish; that’s the magic of editing!)

The latest in the string of bios-aimed-to-stuff-school-library-shelves is now shipping, with the imaginative title Charles Schulz, part of the “Basic Biographies” series.

Only, it may not really be a new biography. I was thrown off by the fact that someone who wrote years ago as “Cynthia Fitterer Klingel” is actually the same person now credited as “Cynthia Amoroso”.  But with the same two authors and the same publisher, this is likely a reprint of the book Charles Schulz, part of the Wonder Books Level 2 Biographies series. And that was a particularly poor little volume; I don’t mind low word-count books for kids, but if you’re going to do that, at least get the words correct. You should be able to write 200 words on a topic without, say, apparently combining Schulz’s first and second wives into a single person.

I’m tempted to buy a copy of this new book just to see if they’ve fixed this. But I don’t feel like paying twenty-some bucks for the privilege; this is one case where I may just wait for a used volume.