- I picked up the first volume of
The Complete Peanuts over the weekend from the local library. Really fun stuff so far, but within the context of today's continuity-laced comic strips, a few questions have arisen:
1) How do
Violet &
Patty (Not Peppermint Patty, regular Patty) go from being Charlie Brown's only female friends, and good friends at that, to becoming the bitch queens of the universe? Within the "modern" context of the series (to me, modern is any era in which Linus, Sally, and Lucy have made appearances), I have never seen those two be anything but whining, self-important horrors. I'd like to know if something happens to make that change, or if it just sort of "happened."
2) Ditto with
Shermy. Poor guy, the first year of the comic was four characters: Charlie Brown, Patty, Snoopy, and Shermy. But by the time Charlie Brown Christmas rolls around, he's be relegated to one line, a line that just accentuates his eventually worthlessness in the series: "Every Christmas it's the same. I always end up playing a shepherd." Poor bastard.
2a) Somewhere along the lines, too, Charlie Brown caught up in age with Shermy, maybe even surpassed him.
3) How does Charlie Brown come to own Snoopy? In the early comics, Snoop's shown as a resident of Charlie Brown's house, Patty's house, and a complete stranger's house. Shermy also walks him on a regular basis. Somehow over the years he becomes Chuck's dog, but I don't know how that happens.
4) Charlie Brown's family moves at some point in the series. There's an early comic where he makes a joke about visiting his grandma in the apartment upstairs. But, of course, later in the series you find he has a front stoop and a back yard. So somewhere down the line the Browns move.
I'm just curious to see how it's handled. In today's world you couldn't make any major character changes without some modicum of character development, so I'm hoping to see how these things were handled back in 1950.
- I've narrowed down my story a bit, but I still have to do a lot of reading before I get to it. I'm halfway through Firestarter, and still need to re-read DT7.
The story's going to be from the perspective of the Crimson King, who has in his posession one of the three remaining pieces of the Wizard' Rainbow. It will more or less be an analysis of the various multiverses of the world of Stephen King, which will be divided into two distinct camps: The Touchables and The Untouchables.
Basic premise, Crimson King uses the Rainbow to see visions of the universes, and how he can use each of them to his own ends. He also realizes that, as long as the timeframe of each universe is within the realm of The Writer, they cannot be tampered with.
Example: Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone cannot be taken as a Breaker because his power manifests itself within the story, and he dies before he exits it. Danny Torrence, however, survives at the end of The Shining, and is last seen graduating from high school. From the moment he graduates, he is within the reach of the Crimson King.
History leading up to the stories can also be affected, mainly due to the presence of Sombra and North Central Positronics in every plane of reality. The Shop and The Arrowhead Project are both shadow projects of NCP, and the alien spaceships of The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatchers could be extra-dimensional rather than extra-terrestrial.
Trisha McFarland, now a 55-year-old employee of North Central Positronics subconsciously designs a particular Guardian of the Beam around a horrific experience she had as a small child, one that she has mostly blocked out of her memory except for a brief flash of her leaning against a tree and listening to her favorite Red Sox pitcher striking out the side.
Man, I wanna get going on this thing, before I bore everyone to death with my plot talk.
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