My latest Peanuts purchases hail from Mexico, as so many things (and folks) around here in Southern California do’ First off we have Felicidad Es Un Perrito Calientito, a Spanish language adaptation of Happiness is a Warm Puppy. They keep the full colored-paper format of the 1962 original… but to show the relative popularity of Peanuts in the US and Mexico, while the English edition sold well over a million copies, this 1964 Editorial Diana edition had a print run of just 4000 copies.

The other is a translated Peanuts comic book, published under the title Periquita Presenta: Carlitos. Now, Carlitos is a Spanish title for the strip, being Charlie Brown’s name. So what is “Periquita”? If you plug it into Google, it will tell you that “Periquita” translates into English as “Periquito”. Hunh? No, no, that’s not an English word. Apparently, it’s Spanish for parakeet. So why is a parakeet presenting Peanuts? Actually, there’s a more relevant fact about “Periquita” — it’s the title used for the comic strip “Nancy” in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking lands.

So why is Nancy presenting Peanuts? Because the Periquita series was normally a reprint of comics that featured Nancy, including ones that had Peanuts stories as backups (additional features that come after the title story in a comic book). So apparently they ended up using some all-Peanuts issues as issues of their Nancy series.

This issue (volume 5, issue 51) is a reprint of the Dell Comics Peanuts issue 4, which actually had a Nancy story in it (well, a Sluggo story, close enough.) But that story has been left out, replaced with other Peanuts content. I don’t have a copy of the Gold Key reprint of Peanuts issue 4 handy; it may well be that the story replacement took place there, and Periquita merely reprinted that.

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