The new Simon Spotlight kiddie book Lose the Blanket, Linus! takes the storyline where Lucy swipes and buries Linus’s blanket in an attempt to break him from the habit, and adapts it into a text (by Tina Gallo) and pictures (by my pal Robert Pope) storybook. And they make a reasonable effort, and it works okay as such things go… but it would be better if it were the original strips. It bothers me that these kiddie books are never an edited presentation of the strips, because one could do a good book that way (probably have to have several stories, because even at one daily per page, few storylines would fill out a 24 page book) that would be quite understandable by the kids and enjoyable by all.

The problem seems to be that the perceived market for this is text-oriented, whether it is libraries and schools thinking that prose is more educational than comics, or adults looking for something that they can read to the kids. I think they’re all off the mark in that. The ability to follow visual sequences is a good educational goal, one worthy of practice, and having a pre-reader follow the pictures as you read them the dialog, or even have them tell you what’s happening, can be fun for parent and child.

Comics have been advancing on a lot of fronts of late. I hope that some licensor makes this particular stab with Peanuts. They’ll end up with fun little books that will include the rhythms and reactions that make the strip’s humor work.

(By the way, if this book sounds very familiar, you’re obviously confused. This is a brand new book. It is nothing at all like another book called Lose the Blanket, Linus! that came out in 2003 and adapted primarily the same storyline… because this book is from the Simon Spotlight imprint of Simon & Schuster, and that book was from the Little Simon imprint of Simon & Schuster. They also have upcoming books recycling the titles Make a Trade, Charlie Brown! and  Kick the Football, Charlie Brown! I swear, they do these things specifically to cause spilkis for people who chronicle Peanuts books on the Internet.)

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