Better Together is a recent Hallmark release that bridges halfway between a pictures-and-aphorisms book like Happiness is a Warm Puppy and a strip collection. The square book is a series of spreads of Peanuts strips (really, Snoopy strips; the dog is in every one of them) paired with an aphorism on friendship. …

Working in the comics field and being a long-time reader of comic books, I’ve grown accustomed to the darker, cynical take on superheroes, depicting them with twisted motivations and deleterious effect. At times, it is quite well done (as in Watchmen); at other times, it’s a weak attempt deconstruction (like …

I get this question from time to time… is there any plans for a fifth and final Big Book of Peanuts? For those who have not seen this series, there were four volumes of The Big Book of Peanuts issued, each a hardback that included all of the Peanuts dailies (i.e., not …

AAUGH Blog reader David wrote me to ask about some odd lettering in a few of the strips that were reprinted in Charles M. Schulz: 40 Years of Life and Art, a big slipcased book that came out for the fortieth anniversary of Peanuts, so three decades ago. It’s just …

I just got a copy of Charlie Brown’s World, one of a set of keyring-based strip reprints that Hallmark issued in 1970 (a set which, with the help of a particularly generous AAUGH Blog reader, I now have most of, but still not all.) These books reprint strips, one panel per …

Following up on my recent review of Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars (a title which, by the way, is an Edgar Rice Burroughs reference): several people gave me confirmation that physical copies of the book actually did come out last December. This is a second (or later) printing. However, they changed …

This is going to be a bit awkward. Snoopy: A Beagle of Mars is a (mostly) original graphic novel that was released in December… but I somehow failed to properly pre-order it. Then my local comic shop tried to reorder a copy for me, but for some reason, the system wasn’t …

So I received the Game Day Peanuts boxed set today (well, I received it yesterday and then let the cardboard box sit untouched for a day. Have you folks heard about this coronavirus thing that’s going around? No, really, you should look it up!) This is the Costco exclusive that …

I have written before about Happiness is a Rat Fink, a 1963 book that parodied Happiness is a Warm Puppy without actually parodying Peanuts itself at all, aping that book’s basic design and concept while focusing on matters that were more adult, more ribald, and more rat finky. Now, I have a …

In dealing with any narrative, and often in dealing with life itself, one can trip over levels of reality. One has to recognize that the following can be very different things: What happened. What someone believes happened. What someone pretends happened. What someone says happened. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a …