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You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown

It all started at Fat Jack’s.

I began working at the legendary Philadelphia comic book store during college and found myself exposed to an amazing amount of genres and creators that I was yet unfamiliar with.

One one occasion, I was reading Joe Matt’s Peepshow collection and he actually had a strip about the store, depicting people I knew.  Through that I found out that Joe had been an employee at the store (and he could sing like a duck).

Of course my inquiry of who else had worked at the store was an education into itself.  Fat Jack’s alum includes Matt Wagner, Nick Bertozzi, Bill Willingham, Michael Avon Oeming, Brian Saner Lamken, Roger Petersen, Bryan J.L. Glass, and local customers included Mike Manley, Mike Leeke, Paris Cullins, Mark Waid, Chuck Dixon, Scott Cohn, Reggie Byers, Nat Gertler, Charles Burns, Eric Battle, and James Sturm.  Other notable customers were columnist Seth Levi, who was infamous for his X-Files episode reviews (at nine years old) and television editor Marvin C. Pittman, who often entertained singing songs of both his own creation and the beloved Safety Dance.

Which leads us to the legendary mini comic, You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown.  I had first heard about this book while working at Fat Jack’s and have never found a copy until this week.  Printed in 1991, You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown is credited to Dr. Casey “Sparky” Finnegan, a pseudonym for Joe Matt, Seth and Chester Brown.

Although it could easily be dismissed as nothing more than redialogued Peanuts strips, You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown is ridiculously clever.  Matt revealed the origins of the strip to The Comics Journal this past summer. 

While it’s true that I have the dubious distinction of being the originator of these strips, it’s equally true that Chester’s “Billiards” is easily the highlight of this mini.

There was a night, maybe sometime around 1993, when I was working on an issue of my comic book, “Peepshow” and I was using some xeroxes of PEANUTS strips from the collection, “You Can Do It, Charlie Brown” as blotter-paper. (Blotter-paper meaning: any clean paper that was handy and could be folded in half and used to rest my hand on while inking in order to protect the original art underneath.)
Anyway, there came a moment when I was using white-out and to remove some excess white-out from my brush, I wiped it on the blotter paper beneath my hand. And that’s how I came to idly white-out the words balloons on a few PEANUTS strips.

Once I saw the balloons whited-out and forgot what they originally said, I began filling them with the first, perverted thing my brain thought they might say.

It was so much fun and I was so happy with the results that I brought the pages out to show to Seth and Chester the next day.

Seth was eager to try it and immediately suggested we each go home and produce a set number of pages for a mini comic.

Less than a week later, Chester brought out his original take on the concept and put Seth and I to shame.

And now, without further adieu, check out You’re Short, Bald and Ugly Charlie Brown.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE 
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