Well, I got my one day at Comic-Con this year, and I’m still recovering. (Not having a hotel room meant lugging around a shoulder bag with everything I needed for my presentation at the end of the day….and I’m still recovering from a leg injury a few weeks back.)
I never did get into the Peanuts pop-up store outside. There was a line about 100 people long to get in in the morning, and when I checked back in the afternoon, the line was shorter, but still more than I had time for.
The convention sales floor was teeming with people, as always, and I tried to spend little time on it. When I checked the Peanuts booth in the morning, yes, a long line I did not have time for. There were other Peanuts things to be seen in other booths.
I made sure to get into the Peanuts anniversary panel by getting into the panel before it (a group of actors-turned-comics-writers, including a pair from the American version of the Ghosts sitcom.) I might’ve been able to get in if I’d waited, this was a larger room than the Peanuts panels are usually in, but they still filled it up.
There was no new news at the Peanuts panel, no upcoming projects announced. It was a look at how Peanuts had existed over the past 75 years, pictures of projects and product. Alec Baldwin brought some charm, of course, but there was no new Peanuts link there, he was just along for the ride (and a brief plug for his podcast.) However, when you have knowledgable folks like Schulz Museum curator Benjamin L. Clark, emeritus studio creative Paige Braddock, and licensing high-honcho and podcast host Melissa Menta, you’re not leaning on the actor for facts, just for his love of the Houndini Snoopy persona from TV special It’s Magic, Charlie Brown. (Oh, okay, there was one bit of news, and that was that panel host Damien Holbrook would be taking over the co-hosting chair of the You Don’t Know Peanuts podcast from David Templeton.)
I did make it back to the Peanuts booth, and the line had died down to almost nothing. Then I saw why the line had died down: they had sold out of the popular items (they restock each day). But… it wasn’t the most popular items I was looking for, and I managed to get everything that I’d wanted.
I got The Daily Beagle, which qualifies as not quite a Peanuts book, but a printed item about Peanuts, so that qualifies for my collection. The book on the keychain may be just a blank notebook, but it is designed to look like an actual Peanuts book (if a hardcover edition of a paperback release), so sure, I grabbed it. And the pin that I thought was just an image of a Peanuts book was more than I want to spend on a bit of flash, but it was the right bit of flash for me, so I blew the $25 on it…
…only to discover once I got it home that it really was a Peanuts book of a sort!
The little pin for the day came free with any purchase… and they threw in the Wednesday and Thursday pins since they had some left over. Now I’ve got 3/5s of a set that I’ll never complete! The bag was free with a $10 purchase.
(But hey, do you want people to think you got to Comic-Con? One of the products listed in the smaller giveaway paper, which just listed products available at the booth as well as launching at other booths across the con floor, was a San Diego 2025 shirt available for online order.)
‘Twas a long day for me, 21 hours between when I woke up and when I got home, but now I can rest and… no, wait, next week is Beaglefest!
