The team bringing Charlie Brown to Scotland has told how the adventure was inspired by the creator of the cartoon icon enjoying a holiday here 30 years ago.
The forthcoming book, Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown, tells how the put-upon hero and friends, including canine sidekick Snoopy, cross the Atlantic after he strikes up a friendship with penpal Morag.
However, it has been revealed the story has its roots in a holiday creator Charles M Schulz, known as Sparky, took with his wife in 1991. They visited locations including St Andrews, Braemar and Culloden, and Schulz would later use the experience as a basis for a comic strip he wrote in 1997.
He died in 2000, aged 77, and the story remained in the Schulz museum vaults in the US for years. Its recent rediscovery led to the creation of a full-length graphic novel in which the Peanuts gang retrace many of the trips taken decades earlier by their creator.
Lex Fejardo, editorial director at California-based Charles M Schulz Creative Associates, revealed its inspiration and said the Scots project was initially intended as a feature animation. He said: “Sparky took a trip to Scotland with his wife in 1991 and the things they did and the experiences they had certainly influenced him.
“A few years later, he started to weave together a Charlie Brown storyline featuring a penpal named Morag and it led to a strip entitled Will Ye No Come Back Again, Charlie Brown. It was never fully produced as an animated spread but the story boards remained in the vault.
© Sipa/Shutterstock“When we were looking to do a new graphic novel, we thought it would be a good idea to go back to this. It was intended for animation but has instead become a graphic novel.
“These books are big studio effort and a lot of work goes on behind the scenes that people do not get to see, so it’s nice to get to share a bit of this.”
The cover features Charlie and friends Linus, Lucy and Schroeder, alongside Snoopy clad in tartan and playing the bagpipes, arriving in a small boat in a misty Scotland.
Schulz was a keen, and extremely adept, golfer and the game also features in the book, with character Lucy depicted teeing off at St Andrews. Another of the gang, Linus, becomes infatuated with the Loch Ness Monster and becomes determined to get a photograph of the mystical creature.
Widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists of all time, Schulz launched his Peanuts comics, featuring long-suffering Charlie, in the 1950s, the series becoming hugely successful. Critics have described the latest book as “delightful, funny and touching”.
Writer Jason Cooper, who says he is of Scottish descent, said: “The story sees Charlie Brown setting up a car wash to try to raise enough money to come to Scotland. The girl who hosts Charlie and his friends when they get to Scotland actually appeared in the original storyboards. We wanted her to be a nice, kind character – the sort of Scottish tour guide they would need and hopefully someone the readers would like. The book also features sheep and ‘coos’ based on Highland cows, which I just found adorable.
“There are locations such as Culloden, the scene of the final Jacobite uprising, and somewhere I would want to go to when I hope to visit Scotland. I know Schulz’s military service meant a lot to him and he was really interested in military history and I wanted to include a place like that.”
Illustrator Robert Pope said: “The characters really evoke Schulz. For their tour guide, I just started noodling around with sketches of pigtails and borrowed freckles from another character as I thought they suited her. We gave her the friendliest face of six designs we originally came up with. Jason kept calling me a telling me how important the coos were. I wanted a lot of fun to come through them. There is also a big arts and music festival based in Edinburgh and we researched the relevant architecture to try to come up with designs for the theatre.
“The book is a travelogue of Scotland. We used reference books and Google images and I have a travel agents within walking distance of my home, so it was fun to go there and find out all I could about Scotland.”
Scotland Bound, Charlie Brown is available to pre-order now
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