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
“Books”

My grocery shopping today landed me two new Peanuts “books”. The more bookish of the two is the latest edition of The Great Big Book of Peanuts Word Seeks, volume 5 to be precise, which as I’ve mentioned before I’ll allow to qualify as a book… particularly because it not …

Upcoming releases
A book I’d not expected to resurface

Back in 2011, Schulz’s granddaughter Dena Hodges issued the first two chapters of  a memoir called In the Shadow of the Family Dog. As I noted in my review at the time, the chapter and the description of the project made it clear that the focus was her relationship with …

Upcoming releases
A box of squares

This May, Fantagraphics is collecting the various small square Peanuts books they’ve published into a new box set, Peanuts All Year Round Mini Collection. This includes: A Valentine for Charlie Brown — Valentine’s Day and romance strips Batter-Up Charlie Brown! — baseball strips Waiting for the Great Pumpkin — Halloween …