I just picked up a copy of The World According to Snoopy, which was released in the UK late last year. This hardcover book, with its cover akin to a 1970s textbook, falls into the “inspirational messages” category. It’s pages are a mix of single-page displays of individual Peanuts strips (always in black-and-white) with pages that work more as mini-posters, with a quote from a Peanuts character at bottom and an image of that character (which kinda matches the quote but which is probably not taken from the same source) above, and these often have bits of color. Despite the title, it’s not all Snoopy, nor does it stick to one theme; there are sections of “Quotes to help you feel… happy”, “… grateful”, “… cosy” (remember, the British don’t like the letter “zee”, they even call it the wrong name), “…inspired”, “… good”, as well as “Quotes for when you’re feeling sad”. So it doesn’t have that targeted sense that makes it a good gift item for a certain occasion, but it’s a reasonable example of what it intended to be.

Meanwhile: I don’t announce every book I publish (under my About Comics imprint) here, because most of them have nothing to do with Peanuts. I wasn’t going to announce my Pride release here, Adventures of A-Girl™!: Go-Go-Go!, as a collection of semiautobiographical 1990s zine comix about an asexual young woman and her visiting Tokyo, building a found family, etc., doesn’t have much obvious link to Peanuts. But then I remembered this panel, and couldn’t resist sharing it with you!

So there you go.

And as long as I’m doing one of these post-with-several-things-so-that-the-folks-who-get-this-by-email-don’t-get-flooded posts, I might as well cover something that I discussed on social media last year, and am surprised I didn’t already put here:

Given the impact that Peanuts has had on language, I’m sometimes asked if Schulz invented the interjection “Good grief!” The answer is not only did he not invent that phrase, Peanuts was not the first strip to have it as a catchphrase! The strip “Tillie the Toiler”, about a flapper (the party girls of the time) was launched in 1921, and in that first year (before Schulz was even born) “Good grief!” appeared at least sixteen times.

“Good grief” continued being Tillie’s catchphrase for decades, and while I don’t think any other pre-Peanuts character used it as much as she did, it definitely did appear in other strips. In fact, on the day Peanuts launched, you can find it in the “Archie” comic strip and the “Sunnyside” comic strip. (That latter example is, and I am not making this up, from The Licking News, which bills itself as “The Only Paper In The World That Cares Anything About The Growth and Progress of Licking”…. all of which makes a bit more sense when you realize it was published in Licking, Missouri.)

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