When you work on Peanuts stories for the beyond-the-strip media, you are told not to modernize them. Even though you shouldn’t shout “this takes place in the past”, the Peanuts kids will continue to inhabit a world filled with wired telephones, where the kids play with marbles but not fidget spinners, where they have baseball games and not e-sports tournaments, where TVs have physical depth.

The new book No Rest for the Easter Beagle (hey, does that title suggest that the Easter Beagle is evil?) takes that to an interesting extreme; at one point, an American flag is pulled out, and it is the version with 48 stars, which was retired in July of 1959. That does stand out, particularly from today’s perspective (this year, the 50-star flag turns 60 years old, making in the longest lasting of the 28 official designs that the US flag has had over this country’s history. (Although if anyone’s wondering, the use of the flag does not dictate more precisely when the story takes place, as the 48 star flag had been established 38 years before Peanuts was launched. (And to save me from answering later: yes, there was a 49 star flag, but that was the officially one only from July 4, 1959 through July 3, 1960.)

But this is a minor point, the flag in question being well less than one square inch out of this entire book. The rest of the book is pretty much a standard modern Peanuts kiddie book, with a setup born out of the strip (the Easter Beagle), and a struggle (the Easter Beagle is too tired this year) which is faced with vast cooperation and happiness, even if the characters do get to display some of their own quarks. The book is written by Tina Gallo and drawn by Scott Jeralds.

The cover on the paperback edition does promise “more than 40 stickers!” and lives up to that. Had it promised “fewer than 43 stickers!”, it would have lived up to that as well. Only seven of them have Peanuts characters on them, a number that is beat by both star stickers and ones with Easter eggs on them.

And speaking of Easter eggs… we see them get broken in a couple scenes of the story, and they appear to be hollow show. Is that a thing? (Sorry, too Jewish to be a real expert on Easter eggs.)

AAUGH Blog Reviews: focusing on the pointless details since 1999!

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