LIghtly outlines Peanuts

New releases

outlinesGot in a couple more books from the UK, Snoopy Saves the Day and Best of Friends. These are two Charlie-Brown-and-Snoopy oriented storybooks, telling original tales using an interesting visual style. The art by Tom Brannon (who has done some interesting modeled-looking Peanuts in the US) takes an interesting tack – he drops most of the black lines of the characters into simply darkening the color of the area they they fill… which is allowed to swell beyond the outline. It works well. I think the choice to put dialog in cursive doesn’t work as well (particularly since when dialog appears in word balloons, it’s in Schulz-style lettering), but all in all, its a cool look… and an example of something we’re seeing more and more, which is finding different ways of looking at Peanuts while still trying to keep a strong core of Schulz.

 

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Animated Peanuts
Officially, it’s a “Super Chubby”

When I reviewed the 2015 book adapting the TV special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, I had this to say: The book that’s titled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (adaptation by Kara McMahon, art by Scott Jeralds) takes basically the whole special and simplifies everything. It briefly tells you that Charlie …

New releases
Review: Letters to Snoopy

Ah, I’m behind in reviewing some things, but I need to clean up my living room of book clutter in preparation for an upcoming oarty… and if I want to remove a Peanuts books from the room and put it up in the AAUGH,com Reference Library, I have to review …

New releases
A different kind of coffee table book

If you have a coffee table, you should have a “coffee table book”, a large, heavily illustrated color volume that your guests can easily and casually flip through, (Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects is a good choice, of course.) But you …