{"id":6108,"date":"2020-09-21T06:43:28","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T13:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/?p=6108"},"modified":"2020-09-19T17:13:22","modified_gmt":"2020-09-20T00:13:22","slug":"review-charlie-and-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/2020\/09\/review-charlie-and-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Charlie and Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is nothing wrong with a cheaply produced paperback of public domain material. It can provice a service. For some material it’s the only way that product will be available. In the case of\u00a0Charlie and Friends in Tip Top Comics – The Full Series Reader Collection<\/a>\"\"<\/strong>, however, it’s the equivalent of offering a DVD-R with a copy of a movie taken off of an old video tape when another publisher has a restored print out on Blu-Ray for a lower price.<\/p>\n

This book takes advantage of the apparent public domain status of the non-Schulz Peanuts stories that ran in Dell’s\u00a0Tip Top Comics<\/em>, offering them up in an expensive color collection and a cheaper black-and-white one. I bought myself a black-and-white copy for evaluation purposes.<\/p>\n

It’s a 128 page paperback. The color version sells for $24.99, the black-and-white for $11.99. Meanwhile, the Peanuts Dell Archive<\/a>\"\"<\/strong>, a licensed title fro Kaboom, has a list price of $24.99, is in color, and runs about 350 pages in hardcover. Does\u00a0Charlie and Friends<\/em> have anything that the PDA doesn’t? Yes, it’s got the covers from the\u00a0Tip Top<\/em><\/a> issues, and it has one one-page story that the PDA missed. On the other hand, the PDA has one one-pager that\u00a0C&F<\/em> missed… plus two pages that\u00a0C&F<\/em> was missing from one story… plus the Peanuts stories from two issues of\u00a0Tip-Top<\/em> that\u00a0C&F<\/em> skipped over. And then, on top of the\u00a0Tip-Top<\/em> material,\u00a0PDA\u00a0<\/em>has stories from\u00a0Nancy<\/em> comics and\u00a0Fritzi Ritz<\/em> comics.<\/p>\n

So, did they do a good job of presenting the material? Not particularly. The pages are each a picture of a comics page printed on a larger page, and you can see things like the staples or shadows at the edge of the pages where it was not flat when being photographed or scanned. The black-and-white version is clearly just a basic color scan, then saved as a grayscale image… which gives you weak grayish blacks, gray whites, and evenly grayed out color that lacks contrast. It’s hard to look at sometimes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>There are simple things one can do with a color scan to give a clearer, more contrast-full image. (I do them all the time.) If publishers Gwandanaland are going to continue doing bulk comics, I hope they learn how to do that. Having heard from someone who has the color edition in hand, they’re not handling the color as well as\u00a0PDA<\/em> does. Which is understandable, as\u00a0PDA\u00a0<\/em>was a focused effort as a stand-out licensed item, so at least a bit of extra time and care was likely put in.<\/p>\n

So no, I do not recommend this book; it’s better than not having these stories, but you have a better option for doing so. (Now if Kaboom doesn’t get to reprinting the rest of the Dell\/Gold Key stories and Gwandanaland does, that would be another matter.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is nothing wrong with a cheaply produced paperback of public domain material. It can provice a service. For some material it’s the only way that product will be available. In the case of\u00a0Charlie and Friends in Tip Top Comics – The Full Series Reader Collection, however, it’s the equivalent … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6109,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","filesize_raw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-releases","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaugh.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}