As part of the effort to clean out the living room, I’ve decided to give up on trying to read all of Peanuts minus Schulz and just give the general impression. This is supposed to be An Important Reflection On Art, but their claims about that seem more like weak cover for having a goofy thing they wanted to do and arts funding to do it.

Published in 2021, this book (subtitled Distributed Labor as a Compositional Process is the result of Ilan Manouach reaching out to people over gig work sites, offering them a few bucks to redraw and possibly reinterpret a Peanuts strip. He says this is “a way to comment the expansion of the possible to produce content and organize labor in comics and will define what [he understands] as a post-digital and conceptual practice in the publishing industry of comics.” Of course, getting random strangers to assault perfectly fine work is not some great new vision. It is a goof.

Are some of the roughly-1000 strips well drawn? Yes, but most are not. Are the expansions and rework something that lends to good comics? Not the one’s I’ve read, but then I’ve chosen not to go through the entire thing, so as to get the living room clean. Plus, some are in languages I do not read. Is the world richer for this book existing? Well, a thousand people had a bit more pocket change.

Of course, the idea that any of this is “minus Schulz” is suggesting that the only thing Schulz did on his work was an ink line, which is a deep misunderstanding of the work. If you spray paint your name on the Eiffel Tower, it’s still the Eiffel Tower.

Anyway, if this intrigues you, the book is scarce but findable… although at the moment, the cheapest copy Bookfinder can locate is $60 plus shipping.

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