Charlie Brown: Here We Go Again—A
“Peanuts” Collection. By Charles Schulz. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.
Heart and Brain: Gut Instincts.
By Nick Seluk. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
The Bad Guys #1. By Aaron
Blabey. Scholastic. $5.99.
The 50-year history of Peanuts would seem to provide an
inexhaustible reservoir of material that can be recycled into new collections
featuring Charles Schulz’s iconic characters, but in fact this is not quite so:
the earliest years of the strip looked little like the later, more-familiar
ones. Still, at this stage there are plenty of recyclable Peanuts cartoons to go around, and the simple but instantly
recognizable faces of the characters are as fresh, funny, and occasionally
poignant as always. The latest re-collection (and recollection) of Peanuts features a particularly fine
assortment of strips. Many of these focus on Charlie Brown’s hapless baseball
team, and one sequence results in Charlie Brown’s decision to “go home and lie
in a dark room,” resulting in three strips that are almost completely black and
one that is 100% black – a virtuoso performance by Schulz (1922-2000) in the
handling of a commonplace cartooning challenge to which few artists rise with this
level of skill. There is also a touching and unusually pointed bit of social
commentary in a sequence in which Linus starts patting birds on the head (“I
think I’ve found my calling”), only to be told by his sister, loud-mouthed
Lucy, that he has to stop. Linus asks Charlie Brown what is wrong with patting
the birds (“They come depressed, and they go away feeling great”), Charlie
Brown explains that it humiliates Lucy, and Linus says he understands that but
does not see what is actually wrong
with what he is doing – leading Charlie Brown to say, “No one else does it.”
That level of commentary on conformity is the sort of thing that pops up
periodically and unexpectedly throughout Peanuts
and is one reason the strip retained freshness for so many years. Here We Go Again also includes several
sequences involving Charlie Brown and the “little red-haired girl” on whom he
has an unrequited crush. In the most heartrending of them, Charlie Brown is
assigned to be her partner in a science project, but cannot drum up the courage
to talk to her – a particularly big problem because Charlie Brown has become a
safety monitor at school, and failure to do the project will mean a failing
grade that will have him lose his safety-patrol position, which is “the first
time I’ve ever really felt like I was somebody.” To make matters worse, Charlie
Brown gets bumped by a car while helping students cross the street in the rain
– but that, paradoxically, makes him feel happy and proud at being “injured in
the line of duty.” To sequences like this, add the ones in which Charlie
Brown’s kite gets hopelessly tangled, often in a “kite-eating tree,” and ones
in which Snoopy becomes (among other things) a bird sanctuary, and several of
the famous ones in which Charlie Brown tries vainly to kick a football held by
Lucy and pulled away by her at the last minute, and you have a collection that
is packed with smiles and some unanticipated tugs at heartstrings – a pretty
good overall description of Peanuts.
Peanuts was always intended for adults as much as for children, but
few comics nowadays look for such a broad audience range. Web-based ones, in
particular, tend to go decidedly in the “adult” direction – which does not,
however, mean that they invariably have the sort of sexual themes that are
usually classified as “adult.” In fact, there are plenty of other notions that
are adults-only, since kids would simply not understand them. Nick Seluk has
fastened on one of them to excellent effect in his Heart and Brain drawings – themselves a spinoff of a series called The Awkward Yeti, a blue-bow-tied,
eyeglasses-wearing Bigfoot type named Lars, with self-esteem issues and,
apparently, numerous body organs that spend their time arguing among themselves
while pursuing their conflicting agendas. Heart
and Brain focuses on two of those organs, but Seluk’s new collection, Gut Instincts, brings in quite a few
more: tongue, lungs, liver, stomach, bowels, etc. Each gets a shape that is
vaguely anatomically correct (perhaps 100% correct if you are a yeti) and a
face that is surprisingly expressive considering its simplicity – in this way,
and only this way, Seluk’s art is Peanuts-like. The basics of Heart and Brain involve the inevitable
conflicts between being emotion-driven and intellect-driven. For instance,
Heart – who is almost always accompanied by a nicely symbolic butterfly – makes
an emotional decision to “get healthier” by going to the gym so he can “improve
my resting me rate,” but within a few panels of stating his intention to Brain,
Heart decides, “I don’t care what you think. I’m getting some chocolate.” While
shopping, presumably at Costco, Heart reacts emotionally to the chance to buy
“mustard by the firkin” (a great adult word), and Brain agrees to the purchase
after analyzing the price and deciding that it is good – but once they get the
condiment home, with some help from a forklift, Heart never uses it, because it
is “gross.” As for the other organs, at one point they try to help with Brain’s
anxiety: Stomach contorts, Bowels agree to “move things along REALLY fast or
REALLY slow, depending on your preference,” and Eyes promise that only one will
“twitch from time to time.” Tongue, a complete hedonist, has his own unique way
of expressing things: “It tasstesss SSSO good” and “Replenish the cookiesss or
I will ussher in a new era of darkness upon you all!” The theme of Heart and Brain is neatly encapsulated
in a single panel showing the two facing in opposite directions as both say,
“Just follow me and everything will be fine!” That is about as adult a way of
looking at things as any contemporary cartoon offers – and with no “adult
language” except the philosophical kind.
The language is intended for
kids, and so are the drawings, in a new series called The Bad Guys that is sort of a comic strip, sort of a graphic
novel, but not really much of either one. Aaron Blabey makes no attempt to propel
his story of traditional animal bad guys who decide to try being good for a
change through meticulous graphic-novel art: his renderings are strictly of the
crude-but-effective type. But neither does Blabey draw in ordinary comic-strip
format: The Bad Guys #1 looks like a
book and reads like one, too, with chapters and everything, except that every
page is a single large panel, or two half-page panels, or (occasionally) three
one-third-page panels, with text held to the minimum needed to keep the story
going. And go it does. It starts with Mr. Wolf, the brains of the
not-yet-created good-guy gang of bad guys, introducing himself and explaining
that he is not the big-toothed, sharp-clawed, granny-imitating character he has
been made out to be (although his police department rap sheet says that is exactly what he is). Mr. Wolf is
determined to turn over a new leaf and have people stop hating and fearing him.
To that end, he has invited some other notable bad guys over to learn about
being good. They are Mr. Snake, whose rap sheet is a house-that-Jack-built
sequence showing all the things he has eaten (including “the police dog who
tried to save the policeman who tried to save the doctor who tried to save” a
pet-store owner whose guinea pigs, canaries and mice Mr. Snake had already
consumed). There is Mr. Piranha, member of the “Piranha Brothers Gang, 900,543
members,” and Mr. Shark, whose rap sheet is so frightening that Mr. Wolf blocks
most of it from readers’ view. Eventually, though, the four bad guys agree to
try being good for a change, starting with a hilarious rescue of a treed cat
that they have all agreed not to eat – except that the cat does not know that,
and reacts with suitable terror and some very intense use of its claws. And
then the bad guys head off to free all the imprisoned dogs from the dog pound –
a caper that puts Mr. Shark in a dress, Mr. Snake and Mr. Piranha through a
window after several bad throws by Mr. Wolf, and the dogs themselves in a
frenzy through their fear of the snake and “some kind of weird sardine type
thing.” Matters may seem inauspicious in this attempt to go against type and
typecasting, but by the end of the book, all the bad guys have decided that it
feels nice to do good things for a change, and they are ready to head out on
another adventure that they believe, against all the odds facing cartoon
characters, will go off without a hitch. “To be continued,” as Blabey writes at
the end – three words that the young readers at whom The Bad Guys #1 is aimed will surely take to heart. And maybe to
brain.
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