Free Peanuts on Free Comic Book Day

Free Comic Book Day is coming up (Saturday, May 4, a mere week-and-a-half away), and really, that’s about my favorite holiday of the year. At plenty of comic shops, you show up, and you get a free comic book… or at some places, a bunch of free comic books. What could be better than that?

KaboomSummerBlastFor those of you who are solely about things Peanutsy, there is indeed something for you, if something small. One of the books being offered for Free Comic Book Day is Kaboom! Summer Blast, an anthology of stories form the Kaboom! line of kiddie comics. Included in it are pages from Peanuts issue 2, featuring Vicki Scott’s story “How to draw Linus Van Pelt as demonstrated by Charlie Brown”. You can see an excerpt of this excerpting freebie here.

You can look up your local participating shops at the Free Comic Book Day website. Please note that while most shops will have ordered this comic, nobody orders an unlimited quantity, so they may run out before you get there. No promises.

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 …

Upcoming releases
Game Day returns

Back in 2020, Fantagraphics dropped Game Day, a boxed set of sports-themes Peanuts strip reprint paperbackss, as a Costco exclusive. Next June it’s coming back, this time in hardcover and available through the usual sources. Designed as a Father’s Day gift, it should be good for anyone who likes Peanuts …

Upcoming releases
An unauthorized? biography

In the past, I’ve talked about the Charles Schulz biographies that are produced as part of bulk lines of biographies for school libraries, very brief, photo-heavy things meant to give kids something to write book reports about. Well ABDO, a company that has produced just such a biography in the …