Speaking of Complete Peanuts covers
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds, Reviews
Long before he was designing the covers for The Complete Peanuts, the respected comics artist known simply as “Seth” took on Peanuts in another way. It has for years been either a very poorly kept secret or not a secret at all (I never know who knows what) that Seth was one of three respected alternative cartoonists who redialogued Peanuts strips to create the blatantly unlicensed minicomic digest booklet You’re Short, Bald, and Ugly, Charlie Brown. Joe Matt, one of the other cartoonists involved, recently fessed up and gave details (warning: link contains an image of raunchy material in the mouths of the Peanuts characters).
Thing is, the pieces that both Seth and Joe Matt were the whole lets-add-sex-to-Peanuts form of parody that was tired well before they got their hands on it (and has gotten no fresher since). The third member of the group was Chester Brown, and while his usual repertoire includes sexual material, he eschews that here, and turns out a bizarrely fascinating piece. He starts it out using a genuine Peanuts storyline, but presenting it as if it was originally in Spanish and translated into English very formally, stiffly, and with the jokes being explained to death. (There’s a difference between a precise translation and an effective translation; I’ve actually been hired on a couple occasions to take precise translations of creative work and bring life back into it. It’s the difference between knowing the language and knowing how to really write.)
And then, as you wrap your mind around that, the storyline devolves in ways that are yes, dark and non-Peanutsy, but kept interesting by the presentation. I can’t claim that it has any deep statement to make about Peanuts nor, for that matter, about much of anything, but it gets nowhere in impressive style.
I’m not going to steer you toward getting this work, both because the material may be hard to fully justify under the concept of “fair use” and because as something that only had a few hundred copies printed sometime in the last century, it’s not something you’re likely to find. But Chester Brown’s piece is creative enough that it makes it worth documenting.
