Charlie Brown’s America

I’ve finally picked up n the clues that Blake Scott Ball has a book coming out from Oxford University Press next year, called Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. This is a version of Dr. Ball’s PhD dissertation, “Charlie Brown’s America: Peanuts and the Politics of Wishy-Washy, 1950–1980″. Ball gave half a dozen presentations on Peanuts at various conferences from 2013 to 2017, so this is clearly not a casual interest. It’s not yet available for preorder, but I look forward to seeing this one!

(In trying to scrape up what info I could on the book, I stumbled across this interesting invocation of Peanuts: “Charlie Brown Versus Snow White: The Effects of Descriptiveness on Young and Older Adults’ Retrieval of Proper Names”.)

Upcoming releases
A book I’d not expected to resurface

Back in 2011, Schulz’s granddaughter Dena Hodges issued the first two chapters of  a memoir called In the Shadow of the Family Dog. As I noted in my review at the time, the chapter and the description of the project made it clear that the focus was her relationship with …

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 …