Thursday was all about the San Diego Comic-Con for me… woke up at 4 AM, drove down to Anaheim, caught the first train from there to San Diego, walked from the train station to the convention center, spent most of my time there walking around the convention center, then walked to a restaurant for dinner, then to the train station to catch the last train back to Anaheim, then a drive home. A very weary AAUGH Blogger got home at 1:23 AM, stuck the key in the door, and promptly broke the key when trying to turn it. Yes, a long day indeed. So I apologize for me taking a day to recover before getting to the write-up.
Not that I have much to say. I went to check out the Peanuts booth in the morning, but the line was not only long, it was capped — it was so long that they weren’t letting more people in line. Which is fine, by the way — if I was doing the full 4.5 days of the convention, I might be fine standing in line for a few things, but when I’ve paid real money to get there and put aside my life for the day, I don’t want to spend hours in line to buy the one $7 item I wanted. Besides, if I had stood in line, I might have missed the Peanuts panel.
So I went to the one Peanuts panel of the con, which was a specifically Peanuts-books-published-by-Abrams-ComicArts panel, with Lex Fajardo leading a conversation between Mark Evanier (who wrote The Essential Peanuts) and Chip Kidd (who crafted the Only What’s Necessary book from the original art in the Schulz Museum archives about a decade back, and who designed The Essential Peanuts), as well as the the mighty Charles Kochman, editor-in-chief of Abrams ComicArts. A lot of the building of the books were discussed, with Evanier talking about his fight to get a certain story in Essential and Kidd talking about the work to find just the right Charlie Brown face to make the cover of the first version of Necessary and then trying to get the folks in marketing to agree to no words on the cover (the compromise: words on a sticker on the cover.) It would go on to be a good con for this team, as yesterday the book won an award for publication design at the Eisner Awards. (The ceremony was, I am told, an odd one, because a list of award winners had already been leaked, so this was a bit anticlimactic but a good time was, I am told, still had.)
The promised announcement at the end of the panel was a bit of an anticlimax in itself… and yet still the exact sort of thing that I should be reporting to AAUGH Blog readers. No new book announcement or some other previously unknown Peanuts project, but a discount… 20% off on their last few remaining copies of the limited, signed “gold” edition of The Essential Peanuts. Since that’s a $200 books, 20% ain’t a minor savings. The discount code you’ll need is SDCC2026GOLD
After the panel and a nice chat with Kidd and Kochman, I did head out to to check the offsite Peanuts/Super 7 shop, but there was a 100 person line to get in… which didn’t bother me so much. As I’m officially not a “Peanuts collector” but a “Peanuts book collector”, I’m spared feeling I’m missing out when I miss the sale of anything but printed or book-related items. If I had gotten in, it would be to look rather than to buy.
In the afternoon, I went back to the Peanuts booth… and the lines were gone! And, well, so were the products!! The majority of things had sold out. Most importantly, the one thing that I had wanted, the zine, was among the things that were no longer available. They would restock everything in the morning — they split up their stock to make sure that people get a chance to buy things no matter which day they showed up. But by then, I would be gone.
Ah, well. No big scoop. No zine. But I got to see some friends, and the energy at the con is always amazing.
