I managed to get my hands on a print copy of the new graphic novel Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown, which isn’t coming from Amazon for a couple weeks yet, simply by buying it at my local comic book store instead. (Support your comic shop, folks!) This is an adaptation of an unproduced special that was planned decades ago. The adaptation is loose. In some cases, this is by necessity; a 20-some minute TV show is rather a short thing to turn into a full graphic novel (while how time is handled in comics is vastly different from animation, a good rough estimate is that one minute of screen time is one page of a comic, so this 89 page story is more the length of a feature film than a TV special.) In some cases, it’s a strong choice in direction. They apparently made it a goal to seem more like a 1960s era Peanuts special than the later work that the unproduced version was, and that meant removing later-period cast for much of the book (Woodstock, Franklin, and Peppermint Patty are in the opening, US-based scenes, but do not go along on the trip) and excising the adults who had crept into animated Peanuts in such works as Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!) and the This is America, Charlie Brown miniseries. And then there’s things done to avoid making the work seem dated (although I have to raise an eyebrow slightly at the choice to make Elton John jokes.)

Writer Jason Cooper’s adaptive story is built around Charlie Brown having a crush on a Scottish pen-pal, and finding an excuse to generate a trip not just for himself, but for Snoopy, Lucy, Schroeder, and Linus to attend a festival there. In the tradition of travelogue comics (such as the wonderful old Dennis the Menace special issues or the Veronica In series, not to mention It’s Tokyo, Charlie Brown!), they make sure to visit a few of the most famous places in the country, including the ones you could name; Loch Ness, St. Andrew’s golf course (the world’s oldest), Edinburgh, and the Culloden battlefield are all visited, if at times briefly. Charlie Brown and Schroeder both play their part as international invitees to an arts festival… Charlie Brown as a poet, for some reason. The story does offer some romance for Charlie Brown…. who, over the years, has more romantic entanglements than anyone in the strip but his dog (and those are mainly judged by the number of Valentines the dog gets.) Reworking the material for print also means usually focusing on gags that aren’t as timing-based, but still trying to keep the larger sense of visual excitement that some of the animated material embraced, getting away at times from the two-kids-over-a-stone-wall Peanuts simplicity. Artist Robert Pope (whom I always like, as an artist and a person) seemed to have particular fun when he got to draw sheep and Highland Cattle.

All in all, a reasonable effort, and a good deal at $9.99. In addition to the 89 page story, there’s back matter including an interview with the creators, some of the storyboards for the unproduced special,  and some notes on the features of Scotland that were covered in the tale.

One little place that made me want to edit it a bit: the unseen teacher is referred to as “Mrs. Othmar”. Now, while Miss Othmar did get married at one point in the strip (February 1960), her name became “Mrs. Hagemeyer”… and that was only referred to in 1961, from then on she was Miss Othmar. Othmar was fired in 1969, but seemed to be back on the job in 1973. “Mrs. Hagemeyer” is referred to in 1979, but not as Linus’s teacher (she’s someone giving Marcie organ lessons.)

I find myself continuing to keep an eye on diversity in new Peanuts materials, which has been a mixed bag. I will say that while Franklin is excised from the bulk of this book, they did take care to populate the carnival in Charlie Brown’s neighborhood with a diverse set of supernumerary characters, which reflects the changing demographics of the US.

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