Peanuts from the silent black-and-white era

Classic finds

So I picked up these coloring books from the 1970s – outside my usual collecting guidelines, of course, but they were all Christmas-themed, and the Peanuts/Christmas link is on my mind these days. Besides, they were cheap and, as it turns out, in immaculate condition.

But I find them kind of odd, for art selection reasons. They include art in which a character is clearly talking… but they don’t have captions. It’s not as if they don’t have space for the dialogue below, in traditional coloring book style. Something about the talking being seen but unheard just haunts me…

Classic finds
Charles M. Schulz: Pinko scum?

As with most of my history finds, I found the column when I was looking for something else, something only related because they both had the term “comic strip.” But there it was… George Boardman, PhD, was telling the world that there was a problem with socialist propaganda on America’s …

New releases
Peanuts Storybook Treasury

The Peanuts Storybook Treasury slams 18 of the Simon Spotlight storybooks from 2015 through 2021 into a single hardcover volume. In order to get them all into 304 pages, it cheats just a little bit, skipping over the covers and individual copyright pages, and occasionally combining what had been two …

Classic finds
A set completed and a mystery solved

Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this: and I later found …