AAUGH: The First Peanuts Strip

Peanuts launched with just four panels, and the AAUGH Blogger, Peanuts specialist Nat Gertler, spends fourteen minutes poring over those panels. Oh, well, including asides about popcorn.

To follow along, you can see the strip on the GoComics site. Alas, that version is colorized, so it’s not the pure experience. A smaller but appropriately black-and-white version can be found on the Wikipedia page about Peanuts. Or you could simply open up your copy of the first volume of The Complete Peanuts to the first strip. (If you don’t have a copy, you should. I invite you to go buy one!)

Share the news!
Product
Charlie Brown in Repo Man

My snoopysense went off while watching Repo Man, the offbeat punk sci-fi flick from 1984. About seven-and-a-half minutes in, titular star Emilio Estevez is silhouetted in a doorway, and on the door across the hall, there’s Charlie Brown! That’s part of a line of banners from the 1970s… in fact, …

New releases
Review: board books two

The two latest board books to arrive are both based around material from somewhere else. It’s Hockey Time, Franklin takes the storybook of the same name by Jason Cooper and Scott Jeralds and reformats it as a board book shaped around the image of a hockey puck.  The formatting is …

Schulz/Peanuts history
Snoopy can’t give blood — but you can!

In recent years, Snoopy has been very successful in getting blood donors, particularly first-time blood donors (and you never have ongoing blood donors unless you have that first one.) The American Red Cross has run multiple campaigns offering special Peanuts t-shirts to donors, and the response has been strong (and …