The AAUGH Blog

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 …

The idea of Apple TV making a new feature-length Peanuts film caught some people off-guard. Sure, they make Peanuts “specials”, but the last time a feature film was made, it became the lowest grossing film that that studio had released, despite also being the best reviewed. Today, I looked at …

If you’re good with digital books, Fantagraphics and Humble Bundle have a frankly amazing deal. You can get 43 Peanuts books in download form for $25. What does this mean? You get every Peanuts newspaper strip, via The Complete Peanuts, every Peanuts Sunday strip in color via Peanuts Every Sunday, …

In late October 1957, newspaper reporter Rolla Crick meant to be visiting the US Navy’s south pole station (Amundsen-Scott) only briefly, but the engine on the US Navy Neptune that had brought him and others there had  broken down and they were all stuck to stay there for weeks. That’s …