Tag Archives: peanuts

It’s the Hypoallergenic Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

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The rock is also suitable for children with lactose intolerance, nut allergies, and chemical sensitivity.

The rock is also suitable for children with lactose intolerance, chemical sensitivity, and peanut allergies. Not recommended for kids with behavior disorders, though. 

There will be no teal pumpkin in front of my house this Halloween; at the rate I’m going this year, there will be no pumpkins at all, let alone jack-o-lanterns, unless we obtain and carve them Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. I feel for kids with allergies. Personally, the list of things I can’t eat anymore is almost as long as the things I like these days, but there are just too many variables, and my budget for candy is pretty small anyway. Plus, we rarely get more than 2 dozen kids, and half the time we take off around 8 to go to a party.

If you haven’t seen It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s worth 21 minutes of your time. I mean, media-wise, the ’60s were a simpler time. There are no explosions, no gore, and nothing the least bit scary, but it’s still a Halloween classic, in its way.

For many months now, I’ve been turning over an idea for another big, serious, depressing comic about my childhood, something that I’ve written about in longer prose work, but couldn’t quite figure out how to frame it in comic format. Today the way in seems to have revealed itself, but there wasn’t a chance to get it started because I went to 6 shoe stores unsuccessfully searching for a pair of minimalist sneakers identical to the pair I’ve been wearing since 2012 instead of drawing a long comic. Maybe tomorrow. Or at least get it started tomorrow, as I now realize that today is only Thursday.

When Harry Potter Fanfic Mashups Go Wrong

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I guess I could have worked a lizard in there somehow but I could only think of Daniel Pinkwater novels and a minor character from Fullmetal Alchemist.

I guess I could have worked a lizard in there somehow but I could only think of Daniel Pinkwater novels and a minor character from Fullmetal Alchemist and this is weird enough as it is. Do kids still read Daniel Pinkwater?

The odds that anyone gets all 5 references here are kind of slim. Harry Potter’s pretty universal among a certain cohort, as is Snoopy, but there’s not a tremendous overlap there. I’m sure kids recognize Peanuts, but I don’t know how many of them, outside of the music theater group, know You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. A lot of people love His Dark Materials but the first movie flopped and it’s not as popular as it ought to be considering how the book is. Guardians of Ga’hoole is a terrific story, too, but it’s even more obscure. The movie was straight up awful, and there are so many books that you have to be pretty committed to the story. I highly recommend it, though, if you would like to read something that riffs off of Lord of the Rings, is written for kids, and stars a large cast of owls. And then I threw in a terrible, but catchy, pop music song from 5 years ago.

So, like everything I do, its potential appreciative audience is already minuscule before I even ask anyone to read it. But here it is. The idea’s been cracking me up for a couple weeks already. I’m dying to see if anyone else gets even a chuckle out of it.

At least it pleases me.

I like this black and white style too. I’ve been using color and fancy backgrounds to cover up inadequacies in the artwork, but it’s time to scale back and let the lines start speaking for themselves. I have another idea that will look better in this style too, or at least in black and white with only a few colored accents.