I finally got a copy of the new small hardcover strip collection Batter Up, Charlie Brown, which started shipping about a week ago. (My apologies for waiting so long; cheapskate Nat was waiting to see if a comp copy might arrive, but no.) This 64 page book reprints three baseball stories from the strip, most reprinted at one daily strip per page. The material is great, of course. The presentation, I’m a little less thrilled about; it has a lot of nice touches (additional strips are on the flaps and on the “boards” under the dust jacket), but the color scheme is focused on the drab – the cover is in drab greens, the paper is grey rather than white – and this doesn’t seem to me to go along with the baseball theme. Our national pastime strikes me more as something for the stark and garish. Yes, Peanuts baseball stories have their thematic grayness, I suppose; being on Charlie Brown’s team is not a source of unrelenting joy. It certainly does distant it from, say, the full-color blare of the AMP! For Kids strip collections, positioning this as a more mature item, but even given that, I think the choices were off.

You can see a flip-through of the book here.

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