Peanuts meet Dracula

A couple years back, a talented one-time collaborator of mine named Adam Rex came out with a children’s book of humorous poems about monsters, called Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich. I meant to blog about that here not only because the book was very funny (which it was) but because when illustrating a story about the son of dracula going to the dentist, Adam clearly designed his characters as a parody of the Peanuts gang.

Somehow, I never got around to that blog entry, but my failure doesn’t seem to have held the book back; it hit the New York Times best-seller list.

I ran into Adam at BookExpo America last week, and was lucky enough to glom a copy of the upcoming sequel, Frankenstein Takes the Cake. Good stuff, of course. And he revisits Dracula Jr., and this time the visuals are a parody of a Peanuts Sunday strip.

Dracula Jr. from Frankenstein Takes the Cake

(By the way, that link up there for the first book? It’s to remaindered copies a mere $5.99 apiece. A recommended bargain.)

New releases
A different kind of coffee table book

If you have a coffee table, you should have a “coffee table book”, a large, heavily illustrated color volume that your guests can easily and casually flip through, (Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects is a good choice, of course.) But you …

Upcoming releases
Destined to blow up

Puffer Jacket Snoopy is a thing… enough of a thing that I’ll be discussing an item that only barely qualifies for this blog (it comes with a book… a tiny book of stickers.) Amazon is now listing for October release a Desktop Inflatable Puffer Jacket Snoopy. It’s one of the …

Upcoming releases
The Return of What’s Necessary

Coming in April is a reissue of Only What’s Necessary, Chip Kidd’s second book on the art of Peanuts, reissued for the 75th anniversary of the strip. (My review of the original 2015 edition is here.) For those keeping track, this is the third cover for this book. Here are the …