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BIZARRO LINCOLN

BIZARRO BABE RUTH

BIZARRO WYATT EARP & JESSE JAMES

from Adventure #291 (Dec ’61) by Jerry Siegel & John Forte
– reprinted in Superman #202 (Dec/Jan ’61)

Sorry for the short post…been otherwise occupied. But yesterday’s post (and great responses) got me to thinking of the possible fates of the Peanuts characters, so I thought I’d try to dig up a few links.

The first two are from yesterday’s comments section:

Edward reminded me of “Weapon Brown” by Jason Yungbluth, which was the strip that first attracted me to his Deep Fried comic. More a parody than a “fate of the characters,” but I thought I’d mention it here anyhow, since “Weapon Brown” is a swell comic.

Scott points to bit of writing by Peter Gillis on the fates of the Peanuts characters. I’m particularly touched by Snoopy’s story.

Kaos2000 takes the slightly more crass route. Also postulates a C. Brown/L. Van Pelt marriage.

Eric Schwartz wrote a song called “Charliesomething” that used to pop up on the Dr. Demento show. Here are the lyrics, and apparently Rhapsody gives you a limited amount of free plays if you’re not a member, so here’s their “Charliesomething” page. I should note that when I tried to listen, the playback failed about 2/3rds of the way through.

Here’s a newspaper review of “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead” that looks at the Peanuts gang’s high school years. I hadn’t heard of this before, but some extra Googling turns up news ‘n’ reviews a’plenty, and the play’s script is available on Amazon. Wow, just what little I’ve read about it makes me want to see it.

And of course, as expected, Charlie Brown grew up to be an ineffectual super-villain. (You thank Tony Isabella right now for making this happen in his Hawkman run. The Kite-Eating Tree even gets Chuck!)

And this has nothing to do with the fates of the Peanuts characters…I just like seeing Snoopy going “BLEAH!” at everyone:

PANEL ONE:

Lucy: “Charlie Brown, how does it feel to know that you will never be a hero?”

PANEL TWO:

Charlie Brown: “What makes you think I’ll never be a hero? I may surprise you! I may save a life or report a fire or do almost anything!”

PANEL THREE:

PANEL FOUR:

Charlie Brown: “Terrible!”

I’m reasonably certain I’ve read this strip before…though if it turns out this is one of those “never reprinted before” strips I’m going to look pretty silly saying that. At any rate, my reading of this latest volume came to a brief halt at this point, as this seemed particularly evil for Lucy in a way that, I think, I never realized before. Even by typical standards of Peanuts cruelty, this seemed awfully harsh…Lucy digging deep into Charlie Brown’s soul, forcing him to admit to her and to himself that he will never come to anything. That seems more painful than a hundred pulled-away footballs.

It certainly contrasts with a strip a few pages later, with Lucy telling Snoopy that sometimes she’s bugged by him, sometimes she wants to hug him…and sure enough, there’s a quiet panel of Lucy simply hugging Snoopy. I’m not going to write an essay about Charles Schulz’s views of human interaction, the inherent contradictions re: kindness versus cruelty, etc. — you know all that already. I just saw the portrayals of Lucy in these two strips as yet another demonstration of Schulz’s skill at creating a multifaceted personality that we can easily accept as an approximation of reality.

Plus, does anyone else get the feeling that when Charlie Brown and Lucy grew up, they were totally going to marry each other? Or am I alone here?

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On a slightly related note, I think this is about as cynical as Snoopy ever got, in regards to his lot in life:

Now that’s bitter.

So reader Chance let me know that an ad for some “sexy webchat” site, featuring a photo of a bikini-clad lady’s bottom, turned up in my Project Wonderful ads in the sidebar yesterday. I don’t normally reload my page during the day, and my Project Wonderful ads are set to “auto-approve,” but I do read my comments via e-mail notification, so thanks to Chance for the warning. That ad just seemed a little out of character for my site, here, so apologies to anyone turned off by it.

As I said, I just have Project Wonderful auto-approve my ads, as for whatever reason, there are a number of advertisers who place ads for two or three hours at a time, and I’d rather not be logging into PW and manually-approving ad requests every hour. I’ve now set my preferences there to reject Not Safe For Work ads, but I’ll try to monitor the ads a little more closely in the future.

In other news:

• Out in your finer stores this past Wednesday:
  
  It’s been years since we’ve had a newsstand presence for Mr. Snart and his creator, Marc Hansen…Ralph Snart has had an online strip for a while, all of which have since been printed in book form and available from said finer stores, as well as from Mr. Hansen himself at his site.

  I didn’t follow the online adventures, simply because I have a hard time keeping up with online comic strips, period (except, of course, for America’s only comic store strip). And we carried all the online strip reprint books, but for whatever reason, I didn’t pick any of them up. Can’t tell you why, exactly…maybe I didn’t just feel like jumping back into a comic I hadn’t read in years by picking up trade paperbacks. Who knows?

  Well, after reading this new issue, I have refound my Snart love and will be obtaining those trades in short order. It’s just as grotesque and immature and hilarious as I remember, and it’s good to have it back, even if just for a three issue series. No one draws twisted, distended musculature quite like Hansen, and his linework is immaculate. As are the beer and vomit jokes. Ah, good times.

• Following up on all my Cat from Outer Space talk from a couple of weeks ago, pal Dorian presents, as part of his ongoing Paperback Book Club series, a copy of the Cat from Outer Space novelization. Boy, that brings back some memories.
• The shocking return of…Licensable Bear™ – BEHOLD:

…for the overwhelmingly adorable sight of Kid Spock and Baby Scotty:

The splash page for the issue is pretty good, too…it’s supposed to represent the “de-aging” process the two characters endure in this story:

…but it looks more like Spock and Scotty have invited their bratty lookalike kid nephews along for the adventure, like the 23rd century equivalents of Pipeye, Pupeye, Poopeye, and Peepeye.

images from Star Trek #42 (Jan ’77) – art by Alden McWilliams

…and that they’re (hopefully) giving away for free to their customers?

Please enjoy these eBay listings.

from Batman #85 (Aug 1954), reprinted in Batman #182 (Jul/Aug 1966)

Looking at the dates of the two different printings of this story…and, in fact, of all the panels I’ve posted this week…I’m always a tiny bit surprised that it’s so short of a gap. Twelve years doesn’t seem that long, but, then again, conventional wisdom at the time was that comics’ readership experienced significant turnovers, with most readers only sticking around for a few years (or months). Twelve years was probably plenty of time for an old story to be “new” again to most of the audience.

So, how many of you folks out there have been reading the same comic book series (more or less, including “reboots” or “new #1s” — you know, where it’s essentially the same series, without a significant gap between “volumes”) for more than ten years? Twenty? Thirty?

I don’t have any continuous series I’ve been reading more than thirty years, but there are more than a handful I’ve read for over twenty. I’ve been reading Hulk comics, in their various incarnations, since 1983, for example.

Thinking about this sort of thing reminds me that there was only a five year gap between the last Golden Age Flash comic and the introduction of the Silver Age Flash. Always seemed like that should have been more of a break than what it was, given its relative significance. (As I recall, one of the reasons for introducing a new Flash was that, five years later, most of their readership would probably not have been around for the previous Flash character.)

Of course, all this has precious little to do with the actual content of the scan. I just found it amusing, is all. Whoever wrote those headlines was really emotionally invested in how Batman comported himself, wasn’t he?

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Happy Fourth of July, where applicable.

Wrecker, you jerk:

Here’s a closer look at that “million dollar” mural:

The microscope is a nice touch.

And apparently “Mr. Mxyzptlk” is another popular balloon in Gotham’s parade:

images from Detective #197 (July 1953), reprinted in Batman #218 (Jan/Feb 1970)

CLICK TO MAKE STRONGER

ad from Batman #218 (Jan/Feb 1970)

from Batman #47 (Jun/Jul 1948)
reprinted in Batman #198 (Jan/Feb 1968)