I’ve done a variation in workshops in which participants take single panel cartoons from the comics section and swap the captions, like this example in Gary Larson’s The Prehistory of the Far Side: It seems like this kind of thing would be a great exercise for the classroom. Heck, even the characters can be spliced into each other: here’s Charlie Brown with Linus’s hair: It’s interesting how in the process of cutting it up, you really learn a lot about Schulz’s strip: how wordy the balloons are (something Nancy creator Ernie Bushmiller famously complained about), how everything belongs to one world and is easily re-arranged and re-combined. This one starts with a piece of text from some litter I found on my walk: I really love how surrealistic they get when you squeeze two images of the same character into one panel:Īnd how just swapping a few bits of text can change a strip’s meaning completely (and make it autobiographical - this was originally about Charlie Brown waiting for his dad to get off work):

This one is made up of a bunch of extra leftovers: 10 and 13, and most of the January 12th strip: I like to take two or three strips and mash them up: this one has a panel from January 16, 1968, text from Jan. My son got a daily Peanuts calendar for Christmas, so for fun I’ve been taking the old pages and making collages out of them: One of my favorite prompts in The Steal Like An Artist Journalasks the reader to remix a comic strip:

Charles burns graphic novels