Sparky – a review
Sparky: The Life and Art of Charles Schulz is a biography aimed at the younger set. In terms of the text, it’s a reasonable attempt. It’s certainly a better and fuller biography than those books that come as part of a series of bios sold in bulk to school libraries. …
review – My Life with Charlie Brown
My Life with Charlie Brown is a collection of various prose essays that Schulz did for various publications, talking (generally) about Peanuts and his life as a cartoonist. For those studying Schulz, this is an interesting work. You’re apt to have seen much of the material before; the biggest chunk …
Complete Peanuts now shipping
The Complete Peanuts 1975-1976 is shipping a bit early (no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.) Life is full, and I haven’t had a chance to complete reading my copy, but I will say that the introduction is probably my favorite of the series thus far. Robert Smigel’s rather …
notes of various sorts
My main computer is back home (yay!), and as I promised with my review of the re-release of Peanuts Philosophers, here’s a comparison of the size in the new edition and the old: Now shipping (early): My Life with Charlie Brown, where Charles Schulz’s writings about his own life are …
Apparently, I didn’t need vector calculus or driving skills
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Peanuts is a recently-released hardcover gift book. The format is pretty straightforward; on the left hand of most spreads is a topic one might need to learn about, and on the right hand is a Peanuts strip in which a characters demonstrates …
Snoopy & Woodstock: Best Friends
The little boxed set Snoopy & Woodstock: Best Friends comes with a little rubbery Snoopy figurine, a littler-but-not-littler-to-scale Woodstock figurine, and a little paperback book, about 3 inches square. The book is a strip reprint… well, kind of. The strips reprinted are abridged editions, each brought down to two select …
Peanuts Philosophers
I’ve always liked the Peanuts Philosophers books, a series of small hardbacks published by Hallmark in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each focuses on one character, running eleven strips where that character espouses some bit of philosophy on some topic. The strips are run borderless, one panel per page. …
Ooh, La La, Peanuts!
So the other day, we had a “French book day” here at the AAUGH.com skyscraper, with two separate shipments of French books arriving, each representing some triumph. Back in 1968, Hallmark issued a cool little quartet of strip collections called The Peanuts Philosophers (soon to be reprinted, as it happens), …
A Schulz book that will probably only exist if you order it…
…and you shouldn’t. Amazon is now listing a book with the title of Charles M. Schulz and the ungainly subtitle of Cartoonist, Comic strip, Peanuts, Secular humanism, Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), Fort Campbell, Combat Infantryman Badge, Art Instruction Schools, She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown. Forty-nine bucks. 76 pages. …
The new Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown book
The new Running Press Kids book adaptation of Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown is now shipping. It suffers from the same problem as many of these adaptations, showing all of the plot and none of the humor of the special, relying on very flatly-presented text and various pictures only a …