I'm a lifelong Peanuts fan, and it's very strange and slightly disturbing to see Charlie Brown and Lucy inserted into a "realistic" setting. As Eric Reynolds wrote on the Fantagraphics Flog!, "It's like that episode of THE SIMPSONS where Homer is transported to our earth." Here's the story behind it, from Harry-Go-Round:
In 1957, Charles Schulz seems to have given The Des Moines Register and Tribune permission to publish an eight-page comic (not drawn by him -ed.) in which Charlie Brown and Lucy fall out of a comic strip and into the arms of some unspecified dude who proceeds to give them a tour of the Register's offices and printing plant. At the end of this visit, drawn in a sort of modified Soviet realism style, the kids are taken back to their strip by a Register paper boy.Besides answering a lot of questions about the newspaper business, this story tells us how large comic-strip characters are in relation to human beings–a lot smaller, apparently, though the blockhead and fussbudget grow to about half-human size when they land in Iowa. (The tourguide is able to walk around with Charlie Brown balanced on one shoulder and Lucy on the other.)
