I try to keep my collecting habit fairly restrained. My recent decision to collect a set of Peanuts badges (or ‘pins’, as the Yanks call them) for a few reasons. Firstly they looked cool. I’ve always liked badges and have a few interesting ones. Secondly they are small – collecting takes up space, so you’ve got to consider if you’ve really got room for everything you want. Thirdly they’re affordable. There are a lot of big ticket items out there, many of them pretty much out of reach. But as we know, part of collecting is about buying now and punting on the future value. And then sometimes you never know what you’ll get. For example my uncle owns a copy of Incredible Hulk #181. He bought the comic for 25c in the 1970’s and last year a mint copy sold for $125,000. Wolverine’s first appearance is worth that much!

At this stage my badge collection has around 60 items in it. Below are most of them:

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Since deciding to collect them, I’ve found a number of good resources online and sites for other people’s collections. The most comprehensive by far is collectpeanuts.com. This guy is pretty into it. As far as I can tell, however, he doesn’t quite have the range of Butterfly Originals that I do ^_^. The guy that owns it also runs a FaceBook page which is fairly active and the other day he posted a link to an upcoming release of licensed limited edition prints by Dark Hall Mansion. Of the two styles of “Charlie Brown’s Christmas” prints they’ve done, one grabbed me immediately. It sums up the Peanuts Christmas “thing” perfectly. I’ve always been attracted to this weird sense of melancholic celebration and I don’t know why. Because of this attraction I’ve ordered 1 of the 300 prints by DHM:

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Fantastic. These things seem to sell out pretty quickly, but if you head over to www.darkhallmansionstore.com and have a look you might be able to pick one up for yourself. It should arrive just in time for Christmas! And so the collection grows…