All this time, I thought Peanuts would never be produced by anyone other than Charles Schulz. I thought Schulz made it pretty clear: after I’m gone, no one will continue the strip. Well, yes — the strip. But we’ve already had a couple of “new” video incarnations of Schulz’s creation, and on March 29 we had another, a direct to video release of an animated feature, “Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown,” accompanied by a print version with the same title (80 7x10-inch pages, color; hardcover from Kaboom!, the kids imprint of Boom!; $19.99). The hardcover incarnation is written by son Craig Schulz and Stephan (Pearls before Swine) Pastis and drawn by Bob Scott, Vicki Scott and Ron Zorman.
The publisher’s news release posted at the end of February was accompanied by four sample pages, and I’m happy to say that the rendering mimics Schulz perfectly — the way his drawings appeared before his hand got shaky. But the page layouts and narrative breakdowns are a dramatic departure from the usual funnybook format: instead of the standard grid, we have half-page panels, embedded panels, vignettes of characters in “panels” without borders. Worth a look I’d say, but maybe not for twenty bucks.
Both book and animated cartoon are based on two long 1960s continuities Schulz drew about Lucy trying to break Linus of his blanket habit: she buried his blanket and forced him to dig up the entire neighborhood searching for it, and, later, made the blanket into a kite that blew away.
The movie, saith Charles Solomon, animation historian, who conveyed his review at herocomplex.latimes.com, is, apparently, not so hot: “Despite the solid source material, the story rambles aimlessly.”
Too bad. But it sounds like Sparky knew what he was talking about when he said no one should try to continue his oeuvre: such attempts can only be trying in the extreme.
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