We’ve all seen “Nietzsche Family Circus” and “Garfield Minus Garfield”—personally, I find “Shut Up, Garfield!” a more elegant and incisive take on the sad dementia of Jon Arbuckle. Not long ago we also had Danziggy.
Such rude interventions into the iconography of comics are nothing new; Robert Armstrong was messing around with “Mickey Rat” (a scurrilous take on Disney’s Mickey Mouse, natch) in 1971, and Mad Magazine’s Mickey Rodent popped up way back in 1955. Still, the joys of stumbling upon a new variation of Archie and Jughead as gay lovers or Nazi sympathizers (depending on one’s mood) never gets old.
I recently learned of a version of the culture-jamming approach used on Peanuts, the nearly universally beloved strip by Charles Schulz, with an unusually high pedigree. In 1993 a self-published mini-comic with a small run of 300 started making the rounds, with the title “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” in the familiar bubble letters similar to the ones Schulz used in many Sunday strips. The small volume was credited to “Dr. Casey ‘Sparky’ Finnegan,” which apparently is a reference to a Canadian children’s television series called Mr. Dressup (“Sparky” was the real life nickname of Charles Schulz). The volume was billed as a “A Roasted Peanuts Book.” At first glance, it was easy to take the strange strips inside for actual Peanuts strips, until one looked closer….. the dialogue didn’t match, indeed it was very rude in places.
“You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” has three sections, each the work of an individual detournist using a similar technique of replacing Schulz’s original dialogue. The first section simply places R-rated dialogue into the bubbles of Linus, Sally, Lucy, and the like, while the third section has Linus crushing hard on the kid with the big round head. The middle section, titled “Billiards,” takes a more original approach, turning a bunch of Charlie Brown/Linus panels into a kind of telenovela, perhaps, or a workaday translation of a finely wrought Argentinian novel, as in: “Juan, is your mother still playing herself silly with the billiards table that is in your family’s home?”
As Shaenon Garrity has pointed out, it’s the “Billiards” section that makes “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” worth the trouble.
In 2010 (just a couple days after Garrity’s item), noted cartoonist Joe Matt published a confession of sorts in The Comics Journal website, explaining that a trio of cartoonists working in Canada, consisting of Joe Matt, Seth (as his works are credited to), and Chester Brown, was reponsible for the jape. It’s an impressive group: Joe Matt’s Peepshow came out to raves in 2003, and Chester Brown has released several acclaimed books for Drawn & Quarterly, including Ed the Happy Clown and The Playboy.
Most fascinatingly, when Fantagraphics was looking for someone to create a product design for its essential line of Complete Peanuts reprints, they called Seth, and nobody could complain that he was a poor choice.
Matt explained that, as with so many artistic endeavors, “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly, Charlie Brown!” started in a casual, almost accidental way, quite similar to Brion Gysin’s invention of the powerful cutup technique. Here’s Matt:
here was a night, maybe sometime around 1993, when I was working on an issue of my comic book, “Peepshow” and I was using some xeroxes of PEANUTS strips from the collection, “You Can Do It, Charlie Brown” as blotter-paper. (Blotter-paper meaning: any clean paper that was handy and could be folded in half and used to rest my hand on while inking in order to protect the original art underneath.)
Anyway, there came a moment when I was using white-out and to remove some excess white-out from my brush, I wiped it on the blotter paper beneath my hand. And that’s how I came to idly white-out the words balloons on a few PEANUTS strips.
Once I saw the balloons whited-out and forgot what they originally said, I began filling them with the first, perverted thing my brain thought they might say…
It’s evident that the standout “Billiards” section was done by Chester Brown—you can tell his lettering a mile away.
I haven’t been able to track down a full version of the comic online—if anyone has a PDF of “You’re Short, Bald and Ugly,” by all means post it! In the meantime here are a few tastes of the sophomoric humor.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
John Heartfield, the original culture jammer
‘Peanuts’ and race-mixing, 1969
Meet Danziggy, punk rock’s most lovable loser