Doonesbury for October 2, 2022 © G. B. Trudeau
Update on the Charles M. Schulz/USPS First Day Issue Event.
Hundreds of “Peanuts” fans and stamp collectors turned out Friday at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa for the first day of issue for 10 new stamps featuring “Peanuts” characters.
Fans of all ages crowded the museum Friday, many dressed in T-shirts and sweatshirts bearing the images of “Peanuts” characters, mostly Charlie Brown and Snoopy.
Michael Schreter, 82, of Palm Springs, was near the front of a long line stretching across the museum parking lot at 9 a.m., two hours before the museum opened.
“I came up just for this,” he said. “I knew Sparky years ago.”
Dan Taylor, for The Press Democrat, reports on yesterday’s event, with a slideshow.
On a related note.
[T]he Peanuts gang has earned the loyalty of millions of fans across the globe. And new ones are being added every day thanks to a range of initiatives from Peanuts Worldwide, the venture owned by WildBrain, Sony Music Entertainment and Schulz’s family. As the executive VP of the Peanuts Worldwide brand at WildBrain, Tim Erickson is tasked with overseeing this enduring property, including the new shows on Apple TV+, the Take Care with Peanuts initiative and retail partnerships across the globe.
TV KIds Weekly interviews good ol’ Tim Erikson.
TV KIDS: Tell us about working with the Schulz family and WildBrain’s L&M and content-development teams to ensure you’re all on the same page about how Peanuts is positioned.
ERICKSON: Everybody wants to deliver the best experience for our fans and to live up to the legacy. We all have the same goal…What would Charles Schulz do? You have to try to do your best to interpret. We’re fortunate that both Jean [Schulz’s widow] and Craig [his son] are involved with our business.
TV KIDS: The 75th anniversary is coming up in 2025. Can you tease any of the plans for that milestone?
ERICKSON: It will be a celebration of the rich heritage and legacy. We’re still pulling together those plans, but it will go across every aspect of how fans engage with us. So everything from experiences to products to content, marketing, you name it. It’s an opportunity for fans to celebrate what they love about Peanuts.
Random House is adding a number of notable new products to its Little Golden Books franchise. A major release is a 12-book boxed set of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars titles—the first time a boxed set has crossed all of Disney’s major brands—to mark the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Company in 2023. The set will be published in December.
Publishers Weekly has the details on a Disney Centennial Little Golden Books Collection.
The anniversary-branded box features titles that cross the decades, including tie-ins to Toy Story, Star Wars: A New Hope, It’s a Small World, The Lion King, Moana, Frozen, 101 Dalmatians, Princess and the Frog, Pixar Cars, and Iron Man. There is also a vintage Cinderella title, as well as a 1950 book, Mickey Mouse’s Picnic, that is exclusive to this box.
On a related note.
…It was The Tenggren Tell-It-Again Book. This led to a series of self-titled books sprinkled throughout his career… Tenggren’s Story Book, Tenggren’s Jack & The Beanstalk, Tenggren’s Bedtime Stories, Tenggren’s Farm Stories, and many others.
This particular book is amazing, because it shows Tenggren’s thought process and refinement gelling into what would become the classic “Golden Book style”.
From Animation Resources: Tenggren and the Genesis of The Golden Book Style.
More at the Gustaf Tenggren site.
Which one is the World’s most published children’s picture-book, and who illustrated it? Not many people know that the originator to the images in the World’s most printed and sold children’s book is Swedish. By the millennium shift 2000, Janette Sebring Lowrey’s The Poky Little Puppy with illustrations by Gustaf Tenggren had sold almost 15 million copies and since then, a couple of more print runs has been made from the book.
THE Collector
Bill Blackbeard’s Treasure of 20th Century Newspapers
Twenty-five years ago, six semi-trucks arrived at The Ohio State University. They contained the world’s most comprehensive collection of newspaper comic strips and cartoons, totaling 75 tons of material. Bill Blackbeard, a comics historian and collector, had amassed this vast and unparalleled collection in his San Francisco home starting in 1967.
MAN SAVES COMICS! Bill Blackbeard’s Treasure of 20th Century Newspapers,
mines the 2.5 million items in the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection,
is on view Nov.12, 2022-May 7, 2023 at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum.
Admission is free.Alongside an immersive display of richly colorful early 20th century Sunday pages are highlights from the sections of a newspaper itself, ranging from Winsor McCay and Nell Brinkley’s editorial cartoons to Rube Goldberg and Kate Carew’s cartoon coverage of sporting events. Obscure and forgotten cartoonists are celebrated alongside the canon works of comic strip history, such as Polly and Her Pals, Flash Gordon, Alley Oop, and Gasoline Alley. Artists featured include George Herriman, Tad Dorgan, Rose O’Neill, Johnny Gruelle, Elsie Robinson, and countless more. The exhibit also features subsets of Blackbeard’s collecting vision, including penny dreadfuls, science fiction fanzines, pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, dime novels and illustrated story papers.
On an unrelated note.
For 45 years, Arthur Lien witnessed, sketched, and recorded for posterity some of the Supreme Court’s most historic moments. His pencil-and-watercolor illustrations have the uncanny quality of transporting the viewer into the room at just the right time. An emphatic gesture from an oral advocate. A raised eyebrow from a quizzical justice. The fraught silence in the packed courtroom before a big opinion announcement.
In an update from earlier this year, SCOTUSblog profiles Art Lien as it looks toward a new term without their in-house court artist of the past years. But…
With a new term about to begin, and without Art producing new pieces, SCOTUSblog is going to start to look a little different. (More details on that coming soon.)
