A couple things:
Finally finished the newest volume of the Complete Peanuts, and boy, that’s the stuff. We finally see, in its entirety, the sequence of Sundays with Charlie Brown and Lucy at a golf tournament (featuring the rare physical presence of adults). The book also contains the arrival of Charlotte Braun, a slightly more extroverted female version of Charlie Brown that didn’t stick around too long, I believe. The book wraps up with a note from the editors regarding the printing quality of some of the strips, given the source materials they had to work with, but they did an excellent job even so. One Sunday strip did have a top tier completely missing, which was reconstructed by the book’s designer Seth, but the promise was made that should a complete version of the strip be discovered, it would be reprinted in a later volume.
It should be noted that there is at least one Sunday strip in the book that is affected by the lack of color, on page 110. The joke is about Schroeder turning “three shades of green” from envy, and there is a three-panel sequence where Schroeder is intended to be literally colored in three different shades of green. It’s a very minor thing, admittedly…it’s not like I expected Fantagraphics to spot color the panels, but I just thought I’d mention it. If it bothers anyone that much, they can bust out the Crayolas and color it themselves.
Also, I did notice in the most recent Previews that Bongo Comics is soliciting orders for the second Futurama/Simpsons crossover, which is quite welcome as the first series was very entertaining. However, I didn’t pay much attention to the description of Simpsons Comics #102, until pal Dorian pointed it out to me:
“Uncle Burn$'” lust for gold leads them all to the island of Donrosa and the Gottfredson Trench, where the Simpsons begin to realize that there is something Huey, Dewey, and Screwy about the whole undertaking, and that they might be “Barks”ing up the wrong tree!
Normally, I’m not a big fan of mixing comic book in-jokes into titles aimed at a more general audience (a point I made previously about Alf comics)…but the Duck fan in me is looking forward to this funnybook.
