Archive for November, 2009

My biggest project for 2009 was co-editing this recently released 60th anniversary Peanuts book.

It’s nearly the 10th anniversary of Mr. Schulz’s death and the more years that pass, the more I’ve realized its human nature to “interpret” his work.  My goal for this book was to simply show the best selection of comics for each decade and use quotes directly from Schulz about his own work.

I wanted this book to be “Schulz unfiltered.” Reviews seem to say that we achieved our goal. This book was a serious team effort between Schulz studio staff (Lex, Stephan, Erin and Justin) and the Schulz Museum (Lisa and Jane). There’s great opening material for each decade written by Jane O. from the museum.

For the holiday weekend I thought I’d share part of Oliver Ho’s review of all the Peanuts books that have come out since Schulz passed away, nearly 10 years ago:

Comprehensive, Colourful, Heavy

Designed by Michael Reagan, and edited by Alexis E. Fajardo and Paige Braddock, who also worked with Schulz on that final Sunday page, Celebrating Peanuts seems aimed at fans (at all levels of fanaticism) who want comprehensive and colourful overview of the entire run of Peanuts in a single volume.

It bears comparison to the three other recent Peanuts projects. The new book has a bit of the “comprehensive overview” quality of the Complete Peanuts; it has a bit of the “pop culture phenom” quality of Kidd’s book; and there’s a lot of biographical and interpretive material, as in Michaelis’ book. But rather than being imitative of those projects, the new book is irresistible, especially for fans. (Of note to fans: as mentioned earlier, it also resembles the 1999 Golden Celebration in size and format, although that volume featured a tremendous amount of direct insight by Schulz, making it another invaluable edition.)

For Peanuts-philes, there can’t be enough of this material: the comics, the insights, the trivia. However, anyone already investing in the Complete Peanuts should take into consideration that this is an expensive and possibly unwieldy addition to the library.

Two aspects of Celebrating Peanuts were unexpectedly notable: each strip has a publication date, and every Sunday comic is in full colour, two qualities missing from the Complete Peanuts project.

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There’s more “story” in Oliver’s actual review, I just lifted a small portion here.

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

So, a few details from my recent trip to Japan (photos courtesy of my pal, Lex).

The top selling item at Universal Studio’s Japan is called the “Snoodle,” a noodle dish featuring little fish cakes with images of Snoopy on them.

At the end of the week, I gave a presentation focusing on “Schulz, the artist,” to a room of a few hundred Japanese licensees.

And then this final photo was snapped at a party, hosted by Sony Creative, in a room on the 37th floor with a great view of Tokyo at night. That is the Tokyo tower just behind my head.

(Lex at left, ME on the right)

Just finished a visit to the Snoopy Studio at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka.

This is just a heads up to those of you who may read JW on comics.com that they are doing some system upgrades this weekend. The short version is that hopefully load times will be faster, but in the meantime, between now and Monday, the site may not work.

This is the official word from the syndicate in NYC: “The physical upgrade is scheduled to begin late afternoon (Eastern Standard Time) Friday, November 6th and end Sunday evening, November 8th. While we will do our best to ensure that the transition is minimally disruptive, Comics.com will likely be somewhat slow, or will exhibit other inconsistent errors during that time. Rest assured that these issues will be temporary, and will be resolved as quickly as possible.

While we expect that the website will be functioning normally by Monday, November 9th, please note that we will be optimizing the new systems throughout that week. Again, there may be occasional episodes of latency or minor disruptions, but the site will benefit from significant performance gains when the process is complete.”

Have a great weekend