off-model Peanuts

Upcoming releases

TributeI’ve got three new Peanuts books sitting here waiting for review, but with preparations for my appearance tonight at the Pasadena Library, I’ll not get to them today. But last night I by chance managed to get my hands on a copy of the upcoming Peanuts: A Tribute to Charles M. Schulz and give it a quick flip-through. While we’ve seen various single images from the book before, it’s more made up of multi-page strips. It’s not all famous folks, a fair number of the names I didn’t recognize (with the caveat that I don’t know the world of webcomics as well as I should), but there’s a real style range in there. Some of it looked more like “parody” than “tribute” (Peanuts meets Lovecraft?) perhaps, but it looked good. The promotional copy’s claim that the book “features never-before seen art styles from Matt Groening” looks to be off, the Groening piece I saw in there at least looked to be a Life In Hell from 2000, but that was the only piece I recognized, I suspect that almost all of it is new material.  I’m looking forward to getting mine when it’s released later this month. You can preorder yours here.

Upcoming releases
Destined to blow up

Puffer Jacket Snoopy is a thing… enough of a thing that I’ll be discussing an item that only barely qualifies for this blog (it comes with a book… a tiny book of stickers.) Amazon is now listing for October release a Desktop Inflatable Puffer Jacket Snoopy. It’s one of the …

Upcoming releases
The Return of What’s Necessary

Coming in April is a reissue of Only What’s Necessary, Chip Kidd’s second book on the art of Peanuts, reissued for the 75th anniversary of the strip. (My review of the original 2015 edition is here.) For those keeping track, this is the third cover for this book. Here are the …

Upcoming releases
Covers to coming things

It’s that time when all the computer systems update and suddenly we’re seeing covers t0o some of the books that are rolling down the road toward us. The big one in this batch is probably Snoopy: The Story of My Life, which is the Cartoon Art Museum’s Andrew Farago ghosting …