{"id":28581,"date":"2014-04-05T22:40:47","date_gmt":"2014-04-05T22:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28581"},"modified":"2026-02-07T11:39:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T16:39:47","slug":"batter-up-charlie-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28581","title":{"rendered":"Batter Up, Charlie Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"290\" height=\"300\" src=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/STK632911.jpg\" alt=\"Cover of Batter Up Charlie Brown, showing Charlie Brown swinging a bat and striking out\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-28582\" \/><b>Batter Up, Charlie Brown!<\/b><br \/>\nFantagraphics Books<br \/>\nWritten and Illustrated by Charles Schulz<\/p>\n<p>These are truly great days to be a <i>Peanuts<\/i> fan &mdash; Fantagraphics Books is nearing the end of their reprint the entirety of <i>Peanuts<\/i> and they&#8217;ve launched a full-color Sundays reprint series, Andrews McMeel has started a line of themed <i>Peanuts<\/i> collections for kids, there&#8217;s a new <i>Peanuts<\/i> movie coming out next year.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#8217;s a new gift book from Fantagraphics, <i>Batter Up, Charlie Brown!<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Fantagraphics released their first <i>Peanuts<\/i> gift book a year and a half ago, <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6730\">Charlie Brown&#8217;s Christmas Stocking<\/a><\/i>, a reprint of two little-seen Christmas stories, little-seen because they were created for magazines rather than the comic strip.<\/p>\n<p><i>Batter Up, Charlie Brown!<\/i>, by contrast, is a collection of comic strips from 1959 and 1960, all about Charlie Brown and his hapless baseball team.  The strips collected comprise three storylines.<\/p>\n<p>In the first, from April 1959, Charlie Brown tries to whip his team into shape before the season begins.  Then, opening day is rained out.  (I had a little difficulty locating this one in <i>The Complete Peanuts<\/i>; Lucy makes reference to Minneapolis as a threat to the Yankees, but the Senators didn&#8217;t relocate to Minnesota until the 1961 season.)<\/p>\n<p>From later in that season, August 1959, Charlie Brown is tasked with pushing his sister Sally around in a stroller when he really wants to be managing his team.  This, by the way, is also Sally&#8217;s debut in <i>Peanuts<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>And, from May 1960, Charlie Brown tries to decide whether or not to steal home plate with predictable results.<\/p>\n<p>If you have the relevant volumes of <i>The Complete Peanuts<\/i>, there&#8217;s nothing new here in <i>Batter Up, Charlie Brown!<\/i> that you haven&#8217;t seen.  In that sense, it&#8217;s an inessential book.<\/p>\n<p>What makes this book nice is the packaging.  It&#8217;s a little square book.  Peel off the dust jacket and there are more baseball-themed panels printed on the covers.  In sum, it&#8217;s a nice little gift book that would find a happy home in the Easter basket for the <i>Peanuts<\/i>-loving baseball fan.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s cute.<\/p>\n<p>Play ball, Charlie Brown!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Batter Up, Charlie Brown! Fantagraphics Books Written and Illustrated by Charles Schulz These are truly great days to be a Peanuts fan &mdash; Fantagraphics Books is nearing the end of their reprint the entirety of Peanuts and they&#8217;ve launched a full-color Sundays reprint series, Andrews McMeel has started a line of themed Peanuts collections for<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28581\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Batter Up, Charlie Brown&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[4081,61,62,4099],"class_list":["post-28581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-baseball","tag-charles-schulz","tag-charlie-brown","tag-peanuts","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}