Here Comes Charlie Brown, in 3D

Here Comes Charlie Brown! A Peanuts Pop-Up. By Charles M. Schulz. Paper engineering, coloring, and afterword by Gene Kannenberg, Jr.; design by Shawn Dahl; front cover design by Chip Kidd. Abrams ComicArts, ISBN  978-1419757785, March 2024. US$16.99. 12 pages, hardcover. 

There are gift books, and then there are gift books. If there is a Peanuts fan in your life, this is for them, full stop. It's definitely for me!

This is hardly an objective review. For one thing, I'm a gushing fan of vintage Peanuts stuff. For another, Here Comes Charlie Brown! was brainstormed and engineered by my colleague Gene Kannenberg, Jr., one of my oldest and dearest friends, with whom I've shared countless hours geeking out over comics and bookness. Gene helped me get through grad school with his sympathy and brilliance, and he just keeps on giving! So, I won't pretend to be disinterested this time. 

Here Comes Charlie Brown! is an ingeniously engineered pop-up book consisting of, mostly, the first-ever Peanuts strip, originally published on October 2, 1950: the beginning of Charles Schulz's famed half-century run. So, it's basically a deluxe reformatting of a single four-panel comic strip. Physically, it resembles a chunky board book, and has just six openings (the last one devoted to a revealing and insightful afterword). Gene K. has colored the originally black-and-white strip, in a subtle, slowly darkening way that matches its acerbic punchline. The coloring, based on Ben-Day dots, feels vintage — as Gene notes, a digital equivalent of mid-20th century comics coloring. What really gets me is the layering of the images: each pop-up opening has three layers, or depths, and Gene shifts the layering with every panel, to, as he says, "amplify" the power of Schulz's original. This effect seemed subtle at first, but becomes more and more forceful with each re-reading. It's super-smart and very much in tune with the complex tone of Schulz's humor. 

All this may sounds simple — a book re-presenting a single short strip — and it's true that my first reading of the whole book took only a few minutes. Yet Here Comes Charlie Brown! is one of those books that makes you self-conscious about being a book user, and even about the whole idea of bookness. It intensifies the comic strip reading experience while making me think about how books are put together. The overall design is by Shawn Dahl (who often designs for Abrams and has done several books with Mutts creator Patrick McDonnell), and it's striking. The book's heavy cover actually wraps around and encloses the whole thing, making it feel less like a conventional book than a gift box; that is, the back cover reaches around to the front, creating a front flap that, counter-intuitively, you have to open from left to right. I cannot describe it well, but perhaps some pictures will help:

This has the effect of creating a sturdy shell for the finely wrought contents inside, strengthening what could otherwise seem delicate. The hand feel of this chunky, pocket-sized object is exquisite. What's more, the visual design of the book is spot-on, with a front cover that consists almost entirely of elements lifted from the original strip. Even Schulz's signature seems to have been repurposed from that strip. So, there are a number of visual rhymes and reinforcements in the total package. Everything resonates. It's a delightful exercise in pure bookness. 

Here Comes Charlie Brown! is more than a decorative novelty. It's an interpretive act: a sensitive reading and reframing of Schulz's original. I can't stop paging through it!

I dearly hope it will be the first of a series.