Whatever could Charlie Brown & Charlie Hebdo have to do with each other?

March 21, 2015 10:12 AM

"The relationship between Charlie Brown and Charlie Mensuel was nevertheless an odd one. The first cover of Charlie Mensuel may have featured Snoopy snoozing on his doghouse, but by the second issue one could already sense the bawdy direction in which the magazine would be heading. Drawn by Al Capp, it features an orange seal, grinning. Look at it again, and you'll see that it doubles as a smiling phallus. The next two covers featured cartoons by Schulz—Linus with his security blanket, Charlie Brown with a valentine. But by the sixth cover, it was back to bawd: Wolinski, maker of many dirty pictures, drew the face of a smiling man with a tiny, scantily clad lady riding on his nose." (SLAtlantic)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (10 comments total)

The Al Capp drawing is a Shmoo, not an "orange seal, grinning."
posted by lagomorphius at 10:28 AM on March 21, 2015 [14 favorites]

Yeah, I was gonna point out the Shmoo as well. That's kind of a major mistake....
posted by mr_roboto at 10:52 AM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Y'know, if you can't tell a Shmoo from a goddamn seal, you got no business writing about com...

Oh, hey everyone, looks like you got that covered already.
(slinks away to RTFA)

Thing does look like a pecker though.
posted by Trinity-Gehenna at 11:24 AM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thing does look like a pecker though.

To be fair, a Shmoo can stand in for just about anything, so....
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:32 AM on March 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

I'm sure Schulz knew about Charlie Mensuel. You know why? Lawyers.
posted by chavenet at 11:43 AM on March 21, 2015

On my bookshelf I have a volume called Monsieur Schulz et sea Peanuts, by Marion Vidal, from 1976, which contains an admiring essay about Peanuts plus satirical and mostly NSFW hommages by the top French cartoonists of the day. I don't think it's that hard to understand— as I've said before, Peanuts is an existential rumination disguised as a gag comic.
posted by zompist at 1:25 PM on March 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Shmoo was a Big Thing in 1949-1950. Have to say, the NSFW suggestion never occurred to me as a child, nor even as an adult, nor presumably to the US government, which created the Shmoo Savings Bond to replace the Disney Savings Bond as a way to teach thrift to the youth of America.

Mind you, Capp himself was something of a lech, so who can say?
posted by BWA at 4:27 PM on March 21, 2015

Al Capp wasn't a "lech." He was a rapist. The link you post details several sexual assaults. That's like calling Bill Cosby "a lech."
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:32 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

In the mid to late seventies, Charlie Hebdo was the best bandes dessinées magazine (for mature audiences) in France, along with Métal Hurlant. The French production of that time has a gleeful smutiness that has no equivalent in anglo-saxon comics, only perhaps in the early Crumb material.
posted by L E M M at 6:14 PM on March 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

There may also have been a certain Charlie de Gaulle in there somewhere.
posted by Wolof at 9:34 PM on March 21, 2015