Museum of Odd Peanuts Books
Hey, that's not Schulz
Reprinting an American book as a British book is not a simple matter, as this example from 1964's I Need All The Friends I Can Get and its 1967 British edition shows. Not only do you have to translate slang and cultural context, but you have to create material that will entertain a different target audience. Judging from this, we must assume that the British prefer to believe that Charlie Brown has a hideous mutant claw instead of a hand.
No, this isn't the poster for the long-forgotten special Your Head is Melting, Charlie Brown. Instead, it's the cover image from Kop Op, Charlie Brown, a 1970 strip reprint from Holland.
There is something hauntingly odd about some of the color
Sunday strip collections published during the 1970s by Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd. You can
be reading a book such as The misfortunes of Charlie Brown or Lucy rules OK?
and find yourself feeling that something is not quite right. You stare at the page for a
long time before it hits you:
The strips are Schulz's. The lettering is not.
For some reason, all of the high-quality Schulz lettering (he was, after all, a professional letterer before he became a professional cartoonist) has been replaced by similar but lower-grade work. Perhaps they were reusing foreign color separations (the color is a little odd) and couldn't restore the black plate. Perhaps they had to translate the strips back into English after (as Woody Allen once said) vandals had broken in and translated them into French. Or perhaps there is just some mad re-letterer on the loose.
Not content to simply reprint 13 pages of Peanuts strips
without proper license or credit (as they did to Mad magazine features in
this same issue), the makers of this comic chose to redraw the strips in question.
After all, if you're going to rip off Schulz, you can at least do him the favor of
improving on his work, right?
- Museum rooms:
- Introduction
- Peanuts for odd purposes
- Learning English with Peanuts
- Hey, that's not Schulz
- Oddities and endities
Note: All Peanuts characters copyright and trademarked United Media. All images used here for journalistic purposes under the fair use portions of the U.S. copyright act.
