His bark is worse than his bite
This year’s new Hallmark book for the upcoming Great Pumpkin holiday is Beware the Vampire Beagle! Like other recent such books, it has a single pop-up image in the back. I’ve not yet gotten one, but given that it’s got Rich LaPierre art, it’ll at least look good.
The line stays drawn
There is much to be said for the modern self-publishing apparatus, but it also makes it mighty easy to offer materials of dubious value. As such, I’ve decided that even in my completism, I needn’t purchase absolutely every Peanuts-related book that someone drops on the public via use of self-publishing …
A set completed and a mystery solved
Twenty years ago when I first published a collection of It’s Only a Game by Charles Schulz and Jim Sasseville, I proudly announced that it was the first reprint collection of the strip ever! But then I saw at auction a little pamphlet that looked like this: and I later found …
The Last Bookstore
L.A.’s famous The Last Bookstore is quite a place not only to find books, but to cave in to whimsy, as its decor (particularly in the upstairs section) might find you walking through a tunnel of books, or you might happen to be there when one of the shelves suddenly …
The real Linus’s real cartooning
Like many Peanuts fans, I knew that the character of Linus was named after Linus Maurer, who worked at Art Instruction alongside Schulz. Like seemingly fewer fans, I knew that Maurer himself had been a syndicated cartoonist… but for some reason I never saw any of his strip before today. …
I really hope they keep this title
Coming in May of next year, as the 18th entry in the series of full color Peanuts strip reprints is…. Snoopy Summer 2025 Kids Collection . Finally, they’ve found a title that has not already been used before! Presumably, that is just a holder title until they fall back on …
Happiness is a foreign book
Happiness is finding that a book you wrote has been translated into another language. Sadness is finding that Amazon lists you as “unknown author”.
Three fantastic stories… out of a couple dozen?!?
With Costco getting out of the book business, I thought we might have seen the end of Costco-exclusive Peanuts books already, but such appears not to be the case. Today I happened upon The Peanuts Gang’s Grand Adventures, a hardcover which combines Snoopy Soars to Space, Adventures with Linus and Friends!, and …
Charles Manga Schulz comes to Comic-Con
It’s less than two weeks to the start of the San Diego Comic-Con (and months too late to get tickets to it, if that’s what you were hoping.) There will be be an official Peanuts booth there, as usual. In addition to their usual line-up of special items made just …
Candidate Snoopy
The promotion of “Snoopy for President” dates back to at least 1961 (possibly earlier, I don’t have great reference on it.) The idea is not limited to US presidential election years, but it does tend to swell then. There was not only merch but newspaper articles on it in 1968. …