Classic finds

Collecting Peanuts books is educational

It wasn’t until today, when I finally get a book that I’ve been wanting for over a decade, the one missing book in my set of traced-and-translated-into-Polish Peanuts strips published in the mid-1980s, that I was aware of this historic fact: Communist-era Poland, while bereft of many things, did in …

New releases

Review: Sparky & Spike

The new book Sparky & Spike: Charles Schulz and the Wildest, Smartest Dog Ever seems to be on the cusp of transitioning Schulz’s cultural image from artist to icon – not the first leaning in that direction, but perhaps the most blatant. It tells the tale of a boy who is …

Classic finds

The Moist Menace

While I’ve covered various Happiness is a Warm Puppy parodies in the past, and while I have a number of programs from Reuben Award ceremonies held by the National Cartoonist Society, I haven’t seen the 1963 program, which is where Carol Tilley (U of Illinois professor who focuses on comics …

New releases

Review: Good Grief, Charlie Brown

So life has been full, and even after I got around to ordering Good Grief, Charlie Brown: Celebrating Snoopy and the Enduring Power of Peanuts, and even after it arrived slowly from England, I let it sit around for over a month before finally getting around to giving it a good …

Animated Peanuts

The Charlie Brown Christmas that slipped by me

So there I was, burning off some time in the mall waiting for my daughter’s movie to let out, so hey, I head into the Hallmark, figure I’ll look at some of the Peanuts stuff that I’m not going to buy (one thing about focusing on books is that it …

New releases

“Mad Libs” now sounds like the title of a Fox News commentary show

Digging through the pile of detritus that accumulates around my workspace, I just found an unopened Amazon envelope that had been there for a while. Inside? A copy of Snoopy Mad Libs, the second Peanuts volume for this classic word game, where someone lists specific sorts of words and a friend …

New releases

Review: Lucy: Speak Out!

As I’ve said before, the folks at Andrews McMeel Publishing produce a series of good solid basic strip reprint books for kids. Hitting stores tomorrow (and available for preorder now, naturally) is Lucy: Speak Out!, the 12th volume in this series. While AMP started with sequential strip reprints, by this …

New releases

Lucy, the book

Catching up on recent purchases, we have Lucy, a hardcover collection of Lucy-centric stories from the Boom! comic books – so if you have all the comic books, or all the trade paperback collections thereof, then you have all this stuff. But it is a collection with a lot of good …

New releases

Choo-choo Charlie

I am not going to buy this. Even though it is, technically, a Peanuts strip reprint. Even though it says AAUGH! on the top. I am not, am not, am not going to buy it. I just gotta keep telling myself that.

New releases

Review: Be a Good Sport, Charlie Brown

Be a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, a recently released children’s storybook, tells the tale of Charlie Brown not being a good sport, in that as the manager of his baseball team, he yells at his players. But then he decides to be nice, and the team all likes him better. …