Brownout

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I’ve written before about how there is a modern method of commercial caricaturing that quite often works. Just as Al Hirschfeld could with some sweeping lines capture the key parts of a Broadway actor to make them instantly recognizable while utterly stylized, so too can a Funko Pop version of Dwight fromĀ The Office or a Lego minifigure of Harry Potter be instantly recognizable. These textures that have been applied to so many fictional characters and to real people can pull out and exaggerate the simple elements that make them recognizable. But with Peanuts characters, that’s hard to make work, because they are already simplified in a very specific way, and with subtle elements that make the character who they are. It’s hard to represent the same character with a different form of simplification and make it feel right.

Squishmallows is a line of stuffed figures filled with what I presume could be classified as memory foam. Because they have material that wants to re-expand when compressed, they come in very rounded shapes. Most of the ones that I’ve seen previously have been original designs intended for fairly egg-shaped creatures… but now there are Peanuts Squishmallows. So the characters inherently take on a new visual texture because of the format of these figures. But then the entire thing gets put through another artistic texture when drawn in the style that is used to represent the stuffed figure on the tag. So once you put Charlie Brown through those two artistic filters, you get this:

Close up on the tag of a Squishmallows Charlie Brown, showing a drawing of the toy

Of all the Charlie Browns, you are the least Charlie Browniest.

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You could’ve been in Peanuts

I just ran across this offer from 1987 where you could create a Christmas greeting strip featuring a friend’s name in it. The art is somewhat reworked from the December 2, 1982 strip. 40 SHARES Share Tweet this thing Follow the AAUGH Blog

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The first Peanuts ads?

Yesterday, while searching for something else utterly un-Peanuts related, I stumbled across an ad campaign that I don’t think I’d ever heard of before. A series of eight ads for Connecticut Blue Cross ran in newspapers during 1958. By 1958, Peanuts had been used in various commercial ways, like Peanuts …

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A big Peanuts reprint

When I showed off the upcoming Franken-Snoopy items from Hallmark yesterday, I left one out, and it’s a big one — 3000 square inches, to be precise. This blanket is a 50″x60″ reprint of the March 17, 1964 Peanuts strip. I hope they don’t start reprinting all the Sundays like …