Enigmatic Snoopy
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
Sitting here, patiently waiting months for me to blog about it, is Enigmatica di Snoopy e i suoi amici Peanuts, a full-color 48 page puzzle magazine that is apparently issue 66 of the quarterly Italian magazine Gioca Con Noi. This issue, intended for Dicembre – Febbraio 2022, is Christmas-themed. It has a range of puzzles for the young reader (word search, crossword, sudoku, jigsaw, etc.), as well as a few thing that qualify more as “activities” than “puzzles”, such as recipes or gift tags to clip out… and you have to be careful about the order you do the book in, because if you clip out this tags, you ruin the cruciverba, the crossword, on the other side of the page.
There are a handful of strips reprinted throughout the pages (in color, and of course, in Italian. The magazine features images of all your usual Peanuts favorites…. plus, for some reason, Thibault.
Activity books are generally outside my focus, but between the Christmas theme, the inclusion of a few strips, and a foreign edition, I could not resist.
As long as I’m posting anyway, I’ll remind focus of one way of supporting this blog is that if you’re going to order something at Amazon anyway, click on, say this link (which will take you the Amazon US listing for the biography Charles M. Schulz: The Art and Life of the Peanuts Creator in 100 Objects, which as I type this is half off!) as your way of getting to Amazon. If you do that, I get a small cut of anything you order from the site, at no extra cost to you.
And as long as I’m doing a little hype: for you folks whose interest in comic strips goes beyond Peanuts, I just issued an interesting volume.
In 1925, Anita Loos issued her famous hilarious novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The next year, before any of the film adaptations were made or any of the stage versions reached Broadway, she brought out a comic strip version, a gag-a-day strip based on moments from the novel. A couple of interesting artists drew the strip — Virginia Huget, who went on to become the leading flapper cartoonist, and Phil Cook, whose art career was cut short by becoming a radio star. For some reason, no one has ever collected these strips into a book… so I did.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: the Comic Strip is available in two editions. The more affordable one, priced at $10, is at Amazon in the US (and hopefully soon in the UK.) That one’s small, a 8.5″x6″ book. The bigger edition, 11″x8.5″, shows of the artwork much nicer, and is available at Lulu.com, Yes, its list price is twice as much, but have I got a deal for you: buy a copy of the larger edition, and once you get it, forward me (at nat@aboutcomics.com) the email receipt Lulu sends you and a link to a social media page where you post a picture of yourself holding the book, and I will send you a free book. Offer is good for US and UK addresses only, and you get to select the book from these three. Offer ends January 1.
