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
Destined to blow up

Puffer Jacket Snoopy is a thing… enough of a thing that I’ll be discussing an item that only barely qualifies for this blog (it comes with a book… a tiny book of stickers.) Amazon is now listing for October release a Desktop Inflatable Puffer Jacket Snoopy. It’s one of the …

Upcoming releases
The Return of What’s Necessary

Coming in April is a reissue of Only What’s Necessary, Chip Kidd’s second book on the art of Peanuts, reissued for the 75th anniversary of the strip. (My review of the original 2015 edition is here.) For those keeping track, this is the third cover for this book. Here are the …

Upcoming releases
Covers to coming things

It’s that time when all the computer systems update and suddenly we’re seeing covers t0o some of the books that are rolling down the road toward us. The big one in this batch is probably Snoopy: The Story of My Life, which is the Cartoon Art Museum’s Andrew Farago ghosting …