Remember how, a month back, I said that the new Running Press edition of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was just as reprinting of last year’s Hallmark Special Edition adaptation?

You don’t? You don’t spend your days memorizing what I say?

Well, in this case that’s good, because I was utterly wrong. This year’s adaptation is a new one – new text, and new art. The art is another Tom Brannon job like the large-sized A Charlie Brown Christmas adaptation, with lots of modeling and color effects. This is probably Brannon’s slickest job yet, the work looks good… although it still has the problem that the modeling on the faces makes the kids look like they’re dressed up as hobos.

As with the Christmas adaptation, this continues the Soviet-style editing of history by putting Peppermint Patty into a special in which she did not appear. This is one place where the text and images don’t seem to have been coordinated – the text leads us to believe that she’s one of the ghosts going trick or treating, but none of the ghosts are wearing her trademark sandals! (When trick-or-treating, she gets “a gummy candy”, which sounds like an updating as well.)

All in all, I prefer the Hallmark edition – it feels more like the special to me. But I certainly cannot fault anyone looking at the images in the new version and thinking they look quite cool. Neither should leave you feeling like you got a rock.

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