A Charlie Brown Christmas trading card kinda

Last year, Topps put out a set of Americana trading cards, cataloging particularly American moments. Card 91 pays tribute to A Charlie Brown Christmas. Well, sort of.

The card has no image from the Christmas special; I suspect it was less a creative preference and more a rights issue (while various Peanuts trading card sets have been offered over the years, I don’t think Topps has ever been the publisher to do so.) Instead it has a photograph of Schulz, which is all well and good if you know that, but it never explains that it’s Schulz, and certainly not everyone will recognize him. The back has a slightly grammatically challenged two-sentence explanation of the special and its impact.

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 …