My oh my, I step away from the computer for a few days of traveling, and all Dell breaks loose!

KaBOOM!, the publishers 0f the new Peanuts comic book stories of recent years, has announced Peanuts:  Dell Archive, a collection of Peanuts comic book stories originally published by Dell Publishing. The announcement is not very specific, which is not helpful for telling what is being collected. We know that this October-shipping book is a hardcover, cover priced at $24.99… which makes me dubious that it includes all of the Dell material. That price is about what KaBOOM! parent Boom! Studios charges for a 200-page full color hardcover… and given that Dell published around 700 pages of original Peanuts comics, I suspect a complete archive would cost a wee bit more. So is this a best-of? A volume 1? Does it include just the ten issues that were officially listed as Peanuts on the indica, omitting the three that said Peanuts on the cover but are technically part of the series Four-Color, as well as all the short stories published in Nancy and Nancy and Sluggo and Tip Top?

In any case, it’s good to see this happening. In the past, I’ve been involved in the efforts of 3 different publishers to issue books collecting Dell Peanuts material, none of which came to fruition (and to be clear, I am not involved in this announced project.) Most of this material has never been in a book – there were the few Schulz-drawn stories included in Complete Peanuts 26, and Chip Kidd included some material in his Peanuts retrospectives. I hope that this volume is part of a complete collection that will cover all the Dell stories (and the handful of short stories originally published by Dell successor Gold Key.) The material was not all uniformly wonderful, but it would be good to have it all accessible.

This is not yet available for preorder through Amazon. I will let you know when it is.

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