“I live my life thinking I’m the rebel, fighting against the forces that be,
Then one day I see the real rebel in the distance,
and the one she’s rebelling is me”

–“The Man”, by Strange Not Dead, off the album Gotta Dammerung

So I get to thinking about that odd parody I once found, “Hot Nuts” is Not a Disease, where a group of underground and alt cartoonists reworked all the panels from Teen-ager is Not a Disease (a collection of Schulz’s religious teenager cartoons), in various raw sexual and scatalogical ways. I did a little more research into the group behind this, Sin Alley, and discovered that this was just one of four cartoon books that these folks defaced in the 1990s. I’m not going to show them or even list their names on this relatively family-friendly blog (you can see them all pictured here, not safe for work), but in all they did two of the Schulz teenager books (the other one being the earlier Young Pillars), a Mark Trail coloring book, and the Hal Sherman cartoon book The Little Friar. That must be the sort of horrid, conformist, federally-approved material that the rebels were trying to bring down in the 1990s.

And since the 1990s, I’ve reprinted three of the four, utterly without irony. All the Schulz cartoons were in the book Schulz’s Youth (now out of print, alas, but used copies can be found), and I recently reprinted The Little Friar as part of my work on Catholic cartoons of the mid-20th century. So I’m the  square, the stick-in-the-mud, the crusty adherent of the old ways! I am the powers that be.

I’m fine with that.

(Oh yeah? I’m really a rebel. I’m the sort of rebel that will make up a totally fake song quote to lead off my blog! Take that, sticks-in-the-mud!)

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