So I got my copy of Comics Squad: Lunch!, the comics anthology with a new Peanuts story in it. And while the creative line-up and samples seen in Amazon’s Look Inside The Book feature made it seem interesting, the printed volume turns out to have one major change from the version seen there. This is how an early page (well, two-thirds of a page) looks at Amazon:

and here’s how it look in the book that’s in my hands:

Apparently, it was originally going to be three-color printed, using red, blue, and black, and instead they switched to two colors, yellow and black. This would be cheaper to print (every time you pass a page through a press for a different color, it costs; traditional color comics use a four-color process).

The Peanuts story is clearly made specifically for this book, not only because it follows the theme of lunch, but also because it’s laid out more simply that the current comic book series is; here they use two tiers of panels on each page, whereas the comic books generally use three. The tale is fourteen pages (including a “cover” page) focusing on Snoopy working in the school cafeteria.

All in all the package is a mixed bag, some of the stories work, some don’t. My favorite is the somewhat hallucenogenic lead story by Cece Bell. But hey, it’s about $8 (less through Amazon at the moment) for 128 pages of comics material, so if you’ve got a kid of the right age who has enjoyed the works of at least a couple of the participants, it’s probably a good purchase for them.

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