Newly released are two children’s storybooks in the Ready*To*Read line: Nest Friends and When Snoopy Met Woodstock. Both of these are adaptations of stories from The Snoopy Show, the currently running original animated series on the Apple TV+ streaming service.

Rather than commissioning new art, the adaptation just has Ximena Hastings adapting the story into text, match with images from the original animation. So it has the look of the computer-based animation, with its fixed line weight on figures, rather than attempting to capture Schulz’s more lively line. I think some of the art, particularly for Nest Friends, could’ve used some color adjustment for the printed page, but all in all it works.

Both books are focused on the Snoopy/Woodstock pairing, which means that there is almost no dialogue; the human cast members make only brief appearances. That also means that much of the humor in the source material is motion humor, which is a bit harder to convey on the printed page. They do a good job of selecting frames to produce that convey what happened, but that’s still less impactful than actually seeing the action. Tools that the cartoonist would use to convey motion are not available here.

Still, these should be good as learning readers for kids who have watched the show, so that what they’ve seen before will help that interpret the words.

Both are available for immediate shipment, and in ebook format.

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