This time last week was about halfway through the famed San Diego Comic-Con. Time was when this was quite a good place to find comic book magazines with Peanuts, but as the focus of the event has switched to the new (in comics, TV, and movies) and away from the fuller range of comics history, those back issues have been harder to find. And it never was a good place for finding the sort of obscure strip collection that I’d need for the AAUGH.com library.

But that’s not to say that there wasn’t things for the Peanuts fans this year. The official Peanuts booth had limited-edition shirts once again. And for one looking carefully, there were a couple of interesting items. First up comes from the HarperCollins booth, a 16-page preview booklet for Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, the major new biography coming in October from author David Michaelis. I’m not going to give you a review based on this preview — but that’s because my review of the whole book (from uncorrected proofs) is almost complete and should be posted soon.

And around the small press booths, I found Weapon Brown, Jason Yungbluth’s parodical reimagining of the Peanuts characters as adults in a post-apocalyptic world. I’d heard about this when it was being serialized in the anthology Deep Fried, but this collection (with a few new pages) was the first time I’d seen it. I didn’t find it actually funny; it was more what I consider a “goof”, a creative exercise in combining the Peanuts gang with the tropes of doomsday movies, and on that level it’s a creative and attentive exercise. But not being actually funny nor actually serving the adventure needs, 48 pages of it seems a mite much. But hey, at least it’s not just the Peanuts-characters-using-dirty-words-in-standard-layout that we’ve seen so many times. This is available from the cartoonist’s website.

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