May01

More upcoming covers, and I was right

by Nat on May 1, 2013 at 2:22 pm
Posted In: Upcoming releases

We now have the covers for the next to books in the series if Be books that recently began:

Be Thankful and Be Friends both be shipping September 3rd.

And remember a few weeks back when I noted a new book titled A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles M. Schulz and I voiced my suspicion that this was not a new book adaptation of the special, but rather a reprinting of Lee Mendelson’s history of the project, A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Legend? Well, I was right!

Oh, yes, here’s the box for this year’s Complete Peanuts boxed set:

Order lots!

 

May01

Peanuts by Shultz

by Nat on May 1, 2013 at 8:19 am
Posted In: Upcoming releases

“Peanuts by Shultz” – if you are like me, that headline made you flinch (also, you wear out your right sneaker much faster than your left, and you’re a little too fond of donuts, but that really doesn’t matter for the subject at hand.) If you’re a Peanuts fan and even slightly attentive to spelling, you’ve seen the cartoonist’s last name misspelled repeatedly, often in internet discussion boards, sometimes in major media sources, and on very rare occasions, on Peanuts books themselves. And you certainly cannot believe that you’re seeing it on the AAUGH Blog, a place where clearly we take our Schulz very seriously.

But it’s not a mistake. I mean it. Peanuts by Shultz.

PeanutsByShultz

Look at this picture. It’s from a story slated for issue 10 of the current Peanuts comic. Entitled “Twinkle Thinkle”, it is written by yours truly…

…and drawn by Jeff Shultz.

Dedicated fans of comics aimed at the younger audience will recognize Mr. Shultz’s name for the many stories he has drawn depicting the adventures of Archie, Betty, Veronica, and their chums. His style is clean, round, and attractive.

(And just to prove that spelling problems don’t befall just Charles Schulz, let me note that the Grand Comic Book Database has 196 credits for Jeff Shultz and 221 for Jeff Schultz.)

Anyway, Mr. Shultz is slated to draw two stories (only one of which is my script) for issue 10, which ships at the end of July… which means that comics retailers are working on their orders for it now. When you go into the comic book store this Saturday for Free Comic Book Day, ask the retailer if they’ll order a copy of Peanuts 10 for you, and be ready to soak in the Shultz goodness. (Many comic shops do run a “hold” service, so that you can get them to order all the issues of Peanuts for you and not worry if it sells out before you get to the shop.)

As you can guess, I’ve been going around telling everyone that one of my Peanuts stories is being drawn by Shultz himself. Hey, is it my fault if they can’t hear the spelling?

Apr24

Free Peanuts on Free Comic Book Day

by Nat on April 24, 2013 at 11:52 am
Posted In: Upcoming releases

Free Comic Book Day is coming up (Saturday, May 4, a mere week-and-a-half away), and really, that’s about my favorite holiday of the year. At plenty of comic shops, you show up, and you get a free comic book… or at some places, a bunch of free comic books. What could be better than that?

KaboomSummerBlastFor those of you who are solely about things Peanutsy, there is indeed something for you, if something small. One of the books being offered for Free Comic Book Day is Kaboom! Summer Blast, an anthology of stories form the Kaboom! line of kiddie comics. Included in it are pages from Peanuts issue 2, featuring Vicki Scott’s story “How to draw Linus Van Pelt as demonstrated by Charlie Brown”. You can see an excerpt of this excerpting freebie here.

You can look up your local participating shops at the Free Comic Book Day website. Please note that while most shops will have ordered this comic, nobody orders an unlimited quantity, so they may run out before you get there. No promises.

Apr19

The The is The Wrong Thing

by Nat on April 19, 2013 at 4:38 pm
Posted In: Animated Peanuts

At CinemaCon, Fox already started promoting their 3-D animated Peanuts flick, even though it’s not out for over two and a half years yet. Unfortunately, their little teaser video doesn’t seem to have ended up online, so I cannot tell you how their 3-D image of Charlie Brown looked… but I am not among the group that says that it cannot look good. Animated Peanuts always has been and will always have to be different in look from the strip by at least some, because the characters really weren’t design for animation. I have hopes that this will be a good film; the only thing that worries me at this point is that, according to this page  at the Hollywood Reporter, the title is The Peanuts. I hope (and expect) that’s wrong.

Apr17

Be books

by Nat on April 17, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Posted In: Reviews

I now have received all three of the new Be books.

Two of these, Be Brave and Be KindBeKind, are matched books. They’re gift books, small but not miniature, each 72 pages of strong bright white paper. One each spread (and occasionally on a single page) is a command to be something (“Be sensitive”, “Be endearing”, “Be professional”) paired with a color Peanuts image and often (but not always) a quote from the strip, demonstrating the command at work. The art is Schulz-based work by the inside team at Creative Associates, whose work you would recognize from the Kaboom comic books: pencils by Vicki Scott, inks by Paige Braddock, colors by Alexis Fajardo. The quotes are well chosen. These are not the books to introduce anyone to Peanuts, but they should do the job of being a nice little gift item for folks who know the characters – which would be most people, I reckon. More books are planned in this series; I wonder if they will run short on things to “be”.

Be Yourself is aimed at kids (where the other two books are put out by “Running Press”, this is put out by “Running Press Kids”), and is a larger square hardback book, 40 pages (plus a couple pages of stickers), full color on slick paper. It features Tom Brannon’s Peanuts art – if you’ve seen some of the recent book adaptations of classic Peanuts specials, you’ve seen his highly-modeled colorings of the characters. This book also tells you to “Be” something (such as “a friend” or “determined”), and then will demonstrate that with Peanuts images and, at times, explanations of that image (“Be a friend” has “Friends like Snoopy come to the rescue” as he patches up Woodstock’s birdhouse, and “Marcie counts on her friend Peppermint Patty in tough situations”.) Again, I think that the reader will have to be familiar with the Peanuts milieu to get anything out of it, and given the younger targeting of the book, that’s less of a sure thing. But if you like the Tom Brannon look, here’s a couple dozen images of it, plus fifteen stickers of those images!