The AAUGH blog

Despite the talk about the upcoming Happiness is a Blanket, Charlie Brown, that’s not the next DVD up. Here are a couple that will be shipping in the next couple months.

• He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown offers up one of the early specials… one that’s already on DVD on the Peanuts 1960′s Collection. However, here it’s paired with Life’s a Circus, Charlie Brown, a 1980 special that’s not out on DVD, plus a documentary featurette about the Redwood Ice Arena, the skating center that the Schulzes had built. This hits in September.
• October brings Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales to market. This is a DVD which was actually available last year, but it was exclusive to the CVS Pharmacy chain. Christmas Tales is a short special, created to round the unedited A Charlie Brown Christmas up to a full TV hour in today’s more-ad-filled TV format. It’s a good special – little short bits about various characters and Chriastmas – but it’s short. It is rounded out with a second special, 1983′s Is This Goodbye, Charlie Brown, a rather random pairing. And there’s no documentary featurette to add to the viewing time. So you get a total of 41 minutes of entertainment, but they do price it lower than their other DVDs due to this. And these specials are not on any other currently-available DVD.

Note: I think I’m figuring out why people have been missing some of my posts – it looks like my “put this post up later” system and my “email people who want posts mailed” system don’t play well together. I will try to remember not to use the first, but if you are getting this via email, you may want to add the AAUGH Blog to your RSS reader instead of relying on the email system.

Ach! I was doing a little research, and discovered that the Schulz prose story was really not original to The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death, as I suggested in this earlier post. Rather, it was an edited-down-for-length version of the story that Snoopy is seen writing in this May 7th, 1989 strip which I had forgotten:

…with this added at the end:

He sat down to write a bestseller. “It was a dark and stormy night….”

So Schulz didn’t really come up with a new prose story for the book. He just plagiarized the writings of a dog! How dare he! The gall! I’ll bet that pooch will have his lawyers on him lickety-…

Oh… wait. Further research here tells me that Snoopy was just a cartoon fictional dog, a figment of Schulz’s imagination, and thus doesn’t have legal stance to sue him. At least not in most states.

Never mind.

I am one shamefaced AAUGH Blogger.

Today I received a copy of a book – not something obscurely old, but something that’s in print now, and has been in print since shortly before this blog launched over a decade ago – with an original piece of Schulz work. No, not a cartoon, not a foreword nor introduction. It’s an original piece of pros fiction, a short story. Very short. The World’s Shortest Stories of Love and Death is a collection of microfiction, limited to 55 words per tale. A few of the other writer’s names are ones I recognize (Barnaby Conrad, Larry Niven, Norman Lear); most are not, but that may say more about me than about the authors.

Schulz’s tale is entitled “It was a Dark and Stormy Night…”, but it’s not the tale about the door slamming and the maid screaming. It’s an all-new non-Peanuts story. It’s not a lost masterwork, but even so, this is exactly the sort of thing the AAUGH.com book guide  exists to catalogue. So I apologize for having been deficient up until now… but that has been rectified, and the story is now listed on on the guide’s “introductions and illustrations” page… despite being neither an introduction nor an illustration.

It’s been a few months since I finished my work on the writing and editing of The Peanuts Collection, and it’s still a few months before its in stores… but in the big leagues, they print the books months before they hit the stores. So I’m sitting here with my author copies (including ones bearing the imprint of the US publisher Little Brown, the UK publisher New Holland, and the Australian publisher Cameron House. Really, they’re all the exact same book except for the publisher logo, price, UPC, and copyright page… but you know me, I’d be glad to have these variations even if I weren’t the author!)

Nat Gertler with book

I’ve written a couple dozen books, but this is the first hardcover edition I’ve had… and what a production. It’s not only hardcover – it’s slip-cased! That’s nice on a couple levels. One is that it makes the whole thing feel fancy, but also it means that all the items that are there to convince you to buy the book (the announcement “includes framable prints”, the description of the book,the UPC,  and so forth, are on the slipcase, so the book itself has a cover that’s all a mosaic of Peanuts/Schulz images.

Start flipping through, get past the Table of Contents, and you land on a foreword by Schulz’s daughter, Amy Schulz Johnson, talking about her dad. Then you get a note from the author (that bum!), and then finally you get to the heart of the book. It’s all organized by two-page spreads. The first spread is a bio of Schulz himself – there’s probably not a lot in the text here that will surprise AAUGH Blog readers, but we’ve got some interesting illustrations, including a 1957 letter from Sparky to his syndicate, encouraging them to change the title of his already-popular strip.

The next spread talks about Peanuts on its home ground, the comic strip. Yes, there’s some nice images here, including reproduction of some “Li’l Folk” art you may not have seen before. But it’s on the right-hand page of this spread that you’ll find the first example of what makes this not just an ordinary book, but rather what the marketing people are calling an “interactive” book. Sticking out of a clear pocket is a little brochure marked as The Peanuts Album. This is a reproduction of a giveaway that was offered by some newspapers in the early 1950s, introducing the Peanuts characters, as well as offering up a then-current photograph of the Schulz family. It’s not an item I’d ever seen before starting work on this book, and now I’m glad I have this.

I’m going to stop here on the journey through the book for now. Let me quickly note a few things, though. First off, even though my name is on the cover, I can’t take all the credit for what’s in this book. Really, I was mainly responsible for the words (and even then, there was a lot of feedback and input from a range of folks). There were some editorial folks putting in a lot of effort finding interesting images and objects; I put in my suggestions, naturally, and even provided access to some of my collection, but they found a lot of good stuff that I would’ve missed.

Secondly, I want to reassure all the collectors out there that the reproduction items in here are just that, reproductions, and they’re marked as such. Each has the small word “reproduction” on them, and some are a different size or length than the original item – these reproductions will be identifiable, should anyone try to pass them off as the original items.

Anyway, this book is available for preorder, either by talking to your local shop or by ordering from one of your favorite online sites:

• Amazon
• Indybound
• Borders
• B&N

You may have been hearing a lot about the Comic-Con in San Diego lately. I’ve been attending for a couple decades now, and have watched it evolve from a pretty-big-for-a-comic-convention event to a rather insane pop culture extravaganza, where movie and TV studios are bringing their previews, their stars, their creators, and various freebies to endear themselves to the gathered audience. You can buy an autograph off of Val Kilmer, see the Mythbusters talk about their upcoming season, get taken to a preview of Scott Pilgrim with the cast in the audience, purchase exclusive toys from big-time toy manufacturers… and yet yes, somewhere amidst all of this, the core of comics remains strong.

Each year they generate a souvenir book, which is given free to all attendees. It’s a couple hundred pages, with information on the cons’ special guests, biographies of the recently deceased in the field, things of that sort. But most of the book is focused on the major anniversaries of the year – for example, this year’s has sections on the 100th anniversary of Krazy Kat, the 75th anniversary of DC Comics, Beetle Bailey’s 60th anniversary… and yes, of course, the 60th anniversary of Peanuts. Calls go out for content for thee sections, and most of the pages are filled with tribute drawings, which is true of the 28 pages devoted to Peanuts in the volume. For the most part, those drawings (run one or two to a page) are people bringing their own style to the Peanuts characters, mostly to unimpressive effect, and occasionally just plain weird (is Charlie Brown supposed to look like a stoner on page 134?) Sometimes these drawn tributes get some big-name comics artists on them, but I see none here that I recognize.

Interspersed with the pictures are prose pieces of a page or two each – one on the very human themes found in “Peanuts”, one by Paige Braddock (creative director at Schulz’s studio as well as crafter of the fine Jane’s World comics) on her memories of Sparky, the text of a Schulz speech from the 1970s, and a couple people reflecting on Peanuts in their own lives. One spends half its length reflecting on an Antiques Roadshow evaluation of someone’s Peanuts art collection before giving a brief history of the work.

On nice find in the book is a page of photos of Schulz from his one appearance at Comic-Con, which was way back in 1974. Back then, the show was probably 1% as big as it is now. Had you been there, you could’ve spent some time up close and personal with Sparky.

(One of the Comic-Con program books had a single image that was a collaboration between Sparky, Russell Myers, and Jack Kirby, which is just so frustrating to me. It’s a nice piece – Kirby’s Demon and Myers’s Broom Hilda having a magic battle over the head of a terrified Linus – but it would be so nice for there to be a piece of art that was just Sparky, who is clearly the iconic strip artist, and Kirby, who as the artistic creator of Fantastic Four, X-Men, Silver Surfer, the Hulk, and so many more, is the iconic comics artist. Myers is a talented cartoonist, for sure, but inherently lowers the icon-ness of the thing.)

If you’ve never been to Comic-Con and you get a chance, give it a try. Yes, it’s all those things you think it is… and a bunch of things you don’t think it is. After so many years, I’m perhaps a little burnt on it, have seen what it has to offer… but what it has to offer is a lot.

As mentioned, I had to miss the Peanuts 60th anniversary panel today at Comic-Con. I missed what I hear was a good Q&A session. However, the panel’s Andy Beall, a cool animation dude, took pity n your poor AAUGH Blogger and gave me a run through the parts of the panel looking at Happiness is a Blanket, Charlie Brown, the new Peanuts animation.

First off, this is going to be a long one, a 44 minute-er (i.e., the length of an hour long TV special, after you strip out the ads.) This is the first full-length Peanuts special to be done without the involvement of any of the original key 4 creative team. Mendelson is not involved,  and Melendez, Guaraldi, and Schulz himself are all dead. But they’re trying hard to draw inspiration from their work, specifically from the first 5 specials. It’s like they want to create a 1960s special, and from the conversation, it was clear they were looking at a lot of details of what made those things worked. And yet, the sample of animation I saw also took some angles that the old work wouldn’t have. They want to ground it in the past, but also grow it for today. Some of the new touches looked quite nice. There were some moments that didn’t look quite right… but then, that was true of the old material as well.

The grounding in the 1960s also shows in the choice of content. The special focuses on Linus and his blanket… particularly, Snoopy’s battle for the blankets. The material is taken in large part from strips from the first half of the 1960s. The B story is Lucy’s attempts to win Schroeder over.

One thing that I suspect will raise the eyebrows of the hardcore is the lack of Guaraldi music. The absence isn’t from any lack of love for the material, but due to a very practical manner: money. They’re trying to produce this special affordably, and licensing the Guaraldi rights costs a heck of a lot. So instead, they commissioned an all-new score from Mark Mothersbaugh. Now, those of you who just know Mothersbaugh from his band Devo may find that an unlikely choice, but he’s had quiet a career composing for films and TV; he’s one of those guys who really knows music in its wide variety. The sample I heard showed clear Guaraldi influence, but as with the animation, it also brought in some things that were clealry new.

Is the end result going to be good? I can’t tell. I only saw a clip. Bur I can say that a lot of earnest effort is going into this. Expect it in 2011.

Goodnight from Comic-Con!