The third issue of Kaboom’s Peanuts comic book hits comic shops on Wednesday, but I managed to grab up an early copy at Wondercon, the normally-in-the-San-Francisco-area comic book convention that was in Anaheim this past weekend. (I managed to pass up buying one of the rare #3 covers for $10, but it was tempting… mainly because someone sent me the rare covers to issues 1 and 2 as a thank you. Nothing haunts a collector like an incomplete set!)

The issue, with the same creative cast as previous issues, has three new stories: one about Charlie Brown struggling to run his team, one a Linus/Snoopy blanket encounter, and a how-to-draw story featuring Linus showing how to draw Lucy. (It’s a head shot only, so we don’t get to struggle with the question of whether Linus still draws people with their hands behind their back, because he can’t draw hands.) There’s also a few recolored Schulz Sunday strips in the book.

One thing I found interesting was that each of the new stories used gags taken right from specific strips; I hadn’t noticed this degree of integrating the Schulz jokes into the stories in previous issues. I think it’s a good choice.

While this run ends with issue 4 (and remember, you can already preorder the collection of issues 0 through 4), Kaboom is already planning for a second run, likely to start later this year.

While at Wondercon, I took some time to talk to Shane Houghton, one of the writers of the Peanuts comic book, and I picked up an enjoyable issue of Reed Gunther, his light-hearted series about an old-west monster fighter and his best friend and mount, a bear named Sterling. If you like his Peanuts work, you really should try Shane in his own natural habitat, where his work is more than ably illustrated by his brother, Christ Houghton. The first five issues (a complete tale) have been collected into a trade paperback, which you can order here.

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