Sunday 10 September 2017

My parody comic strip: Charlie Down - (A Peanuts parody)

Yet another idea I carried around with me for years spontaneously comes to fruition...!

Now hosted on http://charliedown.webcomic.ws/ via the Comic Fury platform (and updated only there cause I'm too lazy to upload everything twice...)

I've come up with the idea of drawing a Charlie Brown parody strip ever since I checked out the first couple of strips (and yes, I mean the 1950s ones...) in a drunk stupor and was appalled at how horribly unfunny those were. Granted, I recently discovered Family Circus (which had been mentioned in my all-time favourite webcomic, 8-Bit Theater, to be exact, but I never bothered to look it up) and had to re-gauge my scale of unfunniness in a painful way - but those old Peanuts strips still are completely unfunny and utterly baffling more regularly than even bloody Garfield! And I doubt the newer ones are any different, by the way...

Anyway, so I somehow came across the parody series Dysfunctional Family Circus (which even has a Wikipedia article!) which was started back in 1989 recently, and today (!) I put one and one together and realised that I didn't have to DRAW a parody (Note: I can't draw for shit...) but could just use the original and use Photoshop on its ass! Granted, I have to use Photoshop CS2 (release date: 1991...) because that is the only free one and Fuckdobe doesn't actually sell its software anymore but only rents it out - it's a pain, but it's once again making it possible for even me to draw a comic (just like I used to do 9 years ago when it took me half a year to learn how to properly imitate Order of the Stick's (which by the way sucks now beyond belief) style because I am spatially retarded).

No clue how I'm gonna manage the rest of 'em (a blog post per comic seems stupid) but here is Charlie Down strip #1... and obviously, the level of funniness may vary with what I'm given to work with. By the way and for the record, this is the only thing I've ever been creating (so far: webcomic, music, drawing, interactive fiction, writing) that has nothing to do with my own story project which is called The She-Wolf and the Goddess ((c)2007 me). Though certain concepts invariably creep in...

Click it to see it in the proper size (sorry):

Seems like this margin ain't wide enough to display the comic in original size... pfff...
Dinosaur Comics also was a huge inspiration for me, as was √ of -Garfield.
PS: Apparently ol' Charlie Schulz didn't own a ruler back in the day, because this strip's borders were actually crooked!

PPS: Thanks to whoever bothered to create a Charlie Brown font - without you this would not be the same. Which it isn't, because it is a non-profit parody. So don't bother suing - though actually being sued by the estate of C. Schulz would definitely be the highlight of my life. ^^ (what a sucky life :-()

PPPS: At least sometimes a direct comparison between the original strip and the parody will be required or at least recommended. After all, mocking Schulz' thoroughly unfunny and sometimes utterly unintelligible (strips #1 and #2 for example) attempt at humour is the basic idea here.

Originally the first 3 panels weren't a dream sequence, but I decided to keep the characters more down to Earth. I was also toying with the idea of Charlie becoming "retarded" because of the punch in panel 3.
By the way, doing these is a lot more work than you would imagine...
Of course, going strip by strip I am still very limited to what I have to work with.
This third one pretty much displays the direction I want to take these strips into.
A long time ago, I once drew 13 hours straight for my TSWATG III comic... I gave up soon after that one.
I really gotta look into finding some comic site where I can host these...
I couldn't spontaneously come up with a more absurdist solution to this abysmal material either. By the way, Snoopy's line is taken from YGOTAS, of course. That series was epic for the entirety of its two seasons.
The OBVIOUS joke. I'm not proud of this one... :-(

Once again, this took a really long time to make. I come up with ideas as I create, and afterthoughts are aplenty. I foolishly forgot how thick the custom speech bubbled had to be stroked, which cost me at least another 30 min and didn't even yield a good result (the original bubbles weren't as crooked).
This one went through a lot of rewrites...

Making them actually hold hands meant a lot to me. It's such a simple but also so immensely powerful thing that mainstream media these days spare out completely (or when have you seen Captain Assmerica hold Generic Love Interest's hand last time?!). Holding hands puts you in a situation of total equality, unlike sex (most of the time).
Oh baby! The setting is basically established now! (Kiddin'.) And Patty looks so happy in the last panel...
Apparently Schulz and Keane were two of a kind in terms of stupidity. I still find Peanuts to be a lot less offensive to my rational brain. Family Circus indeed is the worst shit I have ever come across.
First real in-joke for actual Peanuts fans... the horror...  (of there being actual Peanuts fans out there!)
Plus, that original punchline didn't make any sense with the jump rope, just with the counting in millions...
Phew! So tough to come up with a punchline...

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