The AAUGH Blog

The Anderson Museum of Art in lovely (I’ll assume) Anderson, Indiana has an interesting exhibition coming up next month…. It focuses on artists from Indiana, and look at all the cool things it covers, There’s Garfield! And Baby Blues! Blondie! Marvin! But… there’s no Snoopy. What’s it doing on this blog? That center square in the bottom row? That’s from Young Pillars, Schulz’s single-panel cartoon series for Christian publications from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. “But Schulz isn’t from…

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, it’s this one: Image swiped from a current eBay listing, if someone wants to buy it. The quote and image on the banner come from the May 24, 1967 Peanuts strip.

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 a cute effort, but it makes the actual pages seem weird, with text often put into curved space, and with the picture looking like you’re staring at it through binoculars. The story is, well, this is really more story…

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 seems to have led to further such efforts; one member of my family has signed up for their first donation to get a Hello Kitty item that’s being offered.) But these recent events…

I meant to write a review of Snoopy Presents: There’s No Place Like Home, Snoopy, the new special on Apple TV that is so powerful, Snoopy’s in the name twice! But life is full, so I will just note that it’s watchable, and it does have the Goose Eggs in it. Those of you into the smallest humans in the Peanuts cast or who just like seeing the diversity within Peanuts embraced will be glad to get your dose of Milo. Even if you’re not watching Ted Lasso, if you are a Peanuts completist and have…

In 1958, the vocal jazz/pop band The Hi-Lo’s were riding high. Having released their first album in 1954, they were already working on their eighth… and they wanted to name it after a Peanuts book. As the Washington D.C. newspaper The Sunday Star reported, they were floating the idea of naming their next album Good Grief, More Hi-Lo’s, a reference to the book Good Grief, More Peanuts that had come out less than two years before. They even talked about trying to reach out to Schulz to provide a…

In 1961, Charles Schulz designed a promotional character for the United Fund (i.e., the group that is now called United Way.) He gets named “Little Angel”… or, depending on the press release, “Little Good Guy”. The character appears in promotions for a few years. The reworks of him, which are often locally done, vary in quality. This version appears to be still all Schulz, but Franksteined — they’ve copied one side of the body and flipped it to make the other. Hand sticking up out of the back.

Just added to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is this volume that my daughter and wife (two separate people, let me be clear) found at Kinokuniya, a chain selling Japanese books at eighteen US locations. This paperback, which bears no English title as some Japanese books do, has a title that translates to Not Just Mean Lucy. This is a Lucy-themed strip collection built around the color pink. Black-and-white daily strips are now black-and-white-and-pink. Color Sunday strips? Also now…

As some of you know, the color collection of Schulz’s late-1950s newspaper feature It’s Only a Game that I published in 2013 is a bit weird — namely, the book’s spine is not on the left, as with a normal English book. No, the spine is on the top, and you have to turn pages by flipping them up from the bottom, like a calendar. Well, I’ve finally managed to publish a less-weird edition of this material… it’s the same comics, the same commentary by Schulz’s assistant on the series Jim Sasseville,…

The board book Letters to the Great Pumpkin is fairly straightforward on its goals. Linus decides that a letter-writing campaign is just the thing to get that legendary gourd to appear in his pumpkin patch, and various Peanuts characters each write a letter to the Great Pumpkin that reflects their personality (well, one writes the Great Grape.) The letters can be pulled partially out of slots in the book so that they can be read. I reckon that with a good tug, they can be pulled all the way…

Thursday was all about the San Diego Comic-Con for me… woke up at 4 AM, drove down to Anaheim, caught the first train from there to San Diego, walked from the train station to the convention center, spent most of my time there walking around the convention center, then walked to a restaurant for dinner, then to the train station to catch the last train back to Anaheim, then a drive home. A very weary AAUGH Blogger got home at 1:23 AM, stuck the key in the door, and promptly broke the key when…

I’ve finally got the line-up of things that will be at the Peanuts shop at Comic-Con… but before I get to that, let me note that my Comic-Con plans have changed, and I will now be there only on Thursday. If anyone wants to mee with me, it can probably be arranged; drop me a line. It looks like this year’s Peanuts shop (and remember, this is the one inside the convention, with a totally different set of items than the one outside) will be focused on board-riding, whether Surf or Skate. Ya got…

The famous San Diego Comic-Con is just a couple weeks away, and if you were hoping to go but don’t have tickets yet, well, you’re far too late. These sell out months in advance. (But if you happen to be in San Diego during this time, keep reading, there’s some information for you.) Information is still coming out, so I expect to be adding to this later, but this is what we know so far of Peanuts-y plans there: PANEL: On Thursday at 1 PM in Room 5, it’s “Good Grief! The Enduring Legacy of…

We just purchased a (used) display case, so it finally became time to put together the set of Japanese Snoopy’s Book Cafe miniatures that I’d purchased a couple years back. Rather than using the two-pieces-of-cardboard backdrop that comes with the set, we purchased a larger, plastic set of walls and floors, and my daugther (who did most of the assembly) painted it. The set came with little plastic “books”, some permanently closed, others that are permanently open (and you used stickers to put…

I can think of a number of times that Peanuts storybooks have been converted into board books, often with some shortening and simplification. And I can think of once or twice that the stories from board books have been included inside non-board anthologies of stories. But I can’t think of any case where a board book was converted into a stand-alone non-board book… until now. Coming in January is a non-board edition of Be Kind, Be Brave, Be You! The original board book edition came out in 2018,…

We’ve got the first listed Peanuts book for 2027, and while it’s a board book for kids, it’s going to have something for all you Freida fans. In Snoopy’s Bunny Fun!, Freida wants Snoopy to go after rabbits, but Snoopy has other plans. And if bunnies are your thing, January also brings It’s Easter Snoopy!, a coloring and activity book with crayons.

First, let me note that the Great Pumpkin Carols book which I talked about a while back is now available for preorder. And while I’m doing that, I’ll remind you both that when you preorder, Amazon will give you the lowest price they list the book for between now and when it’s released (often a bit of a savings)… and I’ll also remind you that The AAUGH Blog makes a little bit of income every time you click through on one of these links and order something. Yes, there is some underlying…

I just picked up a copy of The World According to Snoopy, which was released in the UK late last year. This hardcover book, with its cover akin to a 1970s textbook, falls into the “inspirational messages” category. It’s pages are a mix of single-page displays of individual Peanuts strips (always in black-and-white) with pages that work more as mini-posters, with a quote from a Peanuts character at bottom and an image of that character (which kinda matches the quote but which is probably not…

I got interviewed about Peanuts on the WHI Podcast, which is normally a political podcast… which is why, perhaps, we end up talking about the polarization of the nation, now and in the past, within the context of the popularity of the Peanuts strip. Watch and see why I should never do another video podcast until I choose to regrow my beard! https://youtu.be/izv_9Jj0GUY

The legal goings-on this week regarding Peanuts require a bit of a preface: while Peanuts Worldwide (or really Peanuts Holdings) owns Peanuts, they don’t own everything Peanuts. Lee Mendelson Film Productions has rights regarding the classic TV and film material. If I understand correctly (and that’s a real caveat, there are so many things in this world that I don’t understand), they own the rights to all that great Vince Guaraldi music, both the rights to the compositions (i.e., what you see…

The folks at Apple TV (they have dropped the plus-sign) just announced a batch of news for Peanuts animation fans, featuring both offering up more old content and premiering some new material. June 26: a new season of Camp Snoopy drops. July 3: added to the package is This Is America, Charlie Brown, the eight-episode miniseries from 1988 that uses the Peanuts characters to explore American history. (That show about the Mayflower that you ight have seen after an airing of A Charlie Brown…

One of the odd things about being a Peanuts book collector is when looking for books in Japanese, when you’ll discover that “book” gets rather broadly defined. If it can be packed into a rectangle, it may get distributed as a book. Generally, it’s items that can be well-flattened — bags and cases of various sorts are the most common.

The mail brought two new Peanuts board books this week, and the web offered up images of another, so I guess that’s the theme for the day. Cheering You On, Charlie Brown looks first at how Charlie Brown has a lot of difficulty in life, but then at how he has a bunch of friends to support him…. although, frankly, some of the examples of support are a little questionable, as CB’s friends often seem to be a cause of stress. “When Charlie Brown needs to talk, he can always count on Peppermint…

I’ve been looking at some of the past lawsuits over Peanuts. The various owners of Peanuts over the years have been aggressive — generally appropriately so — about protecting their rights to the characters and going after unlicensed use of them. I am not sure if they’re just more aggressive when the use can be seen as vulgar or if that’s just more likely to draw newspaper coverage, but during the late 1970s and early 1980s, it certainly drew coverage. In 1979, a Chicago maternity store made the…

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund‘s Jeff Trexler caught sight of this headline appearing to announce a very unlikely musical. And since I’m sending something out, let me note that Free Comic Book Day is coming up this Saturday. (Also, so is Comic Giveaway Day. This is the result of one comic book distributor having bought exclusive rights to the original name. No one is calling it that, though.) Most local comic shops in the US and beyond will let you wander in and walk out with at least one,…

The world of Print On Demand has continued to generate unlicensed and undesired Peanuts books. If you were carefully searching this past Christmas, you might have found Charlie Brown and the CHRISTMAS COMET That Changed Its Mind (capitalization theirs), a full-color tale. Inside its 32 pages, you get low word-count storytelling and images that are off model to even the casual eye. That book would have set you back a mere $12.99. “But what if I want to get rid of even more money on unlicensed…

I have noted before that there seems to be a fair bit of lasting affection out there for The Peanuts Book of Pumpkin Carols, a booklet of Halloween-related lyrics for famed tunes that Hallmark put out in the 1960s and redesigned and reissued a few times. It’s clear that Chronicle Books wants to tap the spirit of that booklet and pump it up a bit for this fall’s Peanuts: Great Pumpkin Carols book. Now, this is not a reprint of the old booklet with its old songs. Instead, it has new ones written…

It wasn’t that long ago that we had no comics-format biographies of Charles M. Schulz. Now we have the manga biography and the series-of-strips biography (ooh, steeply discounted at the moment)… and coming December, we have just a basic comic book biography. Tribute: Charles M. Schulz is from Tidal Wave, a publisher that has done a lot of biographies of political figures, pop stars, and the like. If you’re looking for the comic book content but want something that sits on your shelves, in…

I saw a comics writer talking about a new project where he was taking some inspiration from Peanuts – as well as some from other sources — to do a story about a comic strip creator who is bringing his strip to an end, in a way with deep personal involvement. Called Good Grief: the End of Talking Back, that the story is going to be told primarily by showing this final run of strips is something I respect and actually reflects some projects I’ve wanted to do. I could tell you more about it, but…

As I type this, there’s a bit under 24 hours left to go in that Humble Bundle deal where you can download the complete run of Peanuts for $25. If you’ve been taking time to think about it… well, it’s time to stop thinking! (Offer good in the US. Not …