It’s less than two weeks to the start of the San Diego Comic-Con (and months too late to get tickets to it, if that’s what you were hoping.) There will be be an official Peanuts booth there, as usual. In addition to their usual line-up of special items made just for the can, they’re going to have on item that’s made for general release but will be available at the con before everywhere else…. and it’s the English language adaptation of Yuzuru Kuki’s manga biography of Charles Schulz.

Being the AAUGH Blogger has its advantages, and one is that I’ve already gotten to see this book. It’s a good one indeed. It isn’t a revelatory biography, there’s nothing in here that you haven’t seen elsewhere. But it’s very readable, and has a tone that allows you to take in not perfectly seriously. Everyone is drawn cute, Schulz is given broad emotional dialogue, it’s all played large (they do warn up front that it would not be possible to offer an exact recreation of events from so long ago — think of this as a biopic rather than a documentary.)

It might take some getting used to for people who haven’t read translated manga before. While the individual sentences still read in normal left-to-right fashion, the order of the panels and the order of the balloons within the panels are made for reading right-to-left. To make matters even more befuddling, there are some Peanuts strips in the comic, and those panels read left-to-right.

The book does include 16 pages in color before dropping into black and white.

There are so many ways to handle a biography, and this one may no be the best way to carry the maximum amount of information, but I think it’s a worthwhile entry in the Schulz bio effort.

The art below is from the original Japanese edition; the English edition has the same art, of course, but different words. If you’re not going to Comic-Con, you can preorder your copy of Manga Biographies: Charles M. Schulz: The Creator of Snoopy and Peanuts here.

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