pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity

Fifteen-odd years ago, I wrote a deliberately silly little piece of warnography, "A Peanuts Halloween II." It involved time travel and Linus causing a global zombie apocalypse by magickally aligning with the demonic force of the Great Pumpkin. At the time, it got me a brief amount of fan mail from usenet readers from all over. An intended sequel has never occurred, as the stars haven't been right. (The last abortive attempt was going to be an even sillier tale of nanotechnology crashing headlong into quantum mysticism, technomagical reincarnation of Linus into Rerun, and so forth.

The entire body of Peanuts strips is slowly being republished in chronological order, roughly 2 years worth to a book. I've recently been reading through, I think, 1957. (I'm vaguely looking forward to being able to locate the point in time that the strip lost its spirit and became a tired retread; my current rough guess is the mid-late 70's.) And the evidence is piling up that among the many flaws, intentional and unintentional, was that Linus wasn't unnatural enough.

Examples: in the official canon, young Linus has performed the following wonders:

1. blown up cubical balloons, with which to make constructions. When allowed to suddenly deflate, said cubical balloons do not fly randomly about, but traverse a perfectly square path in the air.
2. assembled a jigsaw puzzle. Vertically, standing on its edge.
3. performed increasingly elaborate card-shuffles, culminating with making them orbit laterally around Charlie Brown. The latter clearly experienced some existential horror, forced to be at the epicenter of the violation of laws of nature, clearly foreshadowing the horror that would be visited upon the world later.

Spooky stuff.

#