Weapon Brown is a 2002 comic book published by Death Ray Graphics and written by Jason Yungbluth, the author of Deep Fried, an anthology comic also published by Death Ray Graphics, in which the Weapon Brown character and story first appeared split across four issues in a story called A Peanut Scorned. The entire story was compiled from these four issues of Deep Fried, had new content added, and was then released as a one-shot issue in December 2002.
The story features parodies of the cast of Peanuts as well as a number of parodied objects and settings set in a post-apocalyptic world, and drawn in a darker, more adult style as a direct contrast to the more innocent style used by Charles M. Schulz. The one-shot also includes a back-up feature, A Weapon Brown Christmas which shows a story set sometime before the events of A Peanut Scorned.
A sequel graphic novel, Blockhead's War, was published online on a weekly or semi-weekly basis between April 2007 and December 2012. Comprising 339 installments, the sequel again focuses on the characters of Weapon Brown and Snoopy, but moves beyond parodying the characters/setting of Schulz's Peanuts to involve them with characters and situations based upon hundreds of newspaper-published comic strips dating back to the inception of the form (the installment published October 16, 2012 featured The Yellow Kid, a character/cartoon first appearing in 1895). Characters from Calvin and Hobbes, Little Orphan Annie, Crock, Dilbert, Popeye, B.C., Beetle Bailey, The Boondocks, The Wizard of Id, Broom-Hilda, and Garfield are among those prominently featured. A sequel, Weapon Brown: Aftershock, began some years later and ended in 2022.
A Peanut Scorned
Weapon Brown is set in a post-apocalyptic world, and the story itself centers on the eponymous character Weapon Brown, who is on a mission to rescue the woman he loves from a former acquaintance: Linus Van Pelt, a man who is obsessed with a supernatural entity he calls "the Great Pumpkin". Over the course of the story's events, readers are introduced to a number of characters who are clearly recognizable as adult parodies of well-known Peanuts characters. Weapon Brown and his pet Snoopy are themselves parodies of Charlie Brown and Snoopy. The story begins with Weapon Brown having an encounter with Schroeder, while in the course of looking for Linus' sister Lucy. While he gets no information from the piano player about Lucy's whereabouts, he does learn that a woman named Patty - later revealed to be the Weapon Brown incarnation of Peppermint Patty - would know where Lucy is and directs Weapon Brown to ask her at the whorehouse she owns, which he does, greeting Patty with a slap to the face, an action she recognizes as being distinctly exclusive to Weapon Brown and greets him with a kiss.
After meeting with Patty, he learns where to find Lucy, and before heading off to confront her spends the night at Patty's whorehouse, where he has a brief nightmare about how he was transformed into a one-man cyborg army. Awakening from this nightmare, and not remembering much of anything in it, he confronts Lucy, looking for information about Linus. While she has no idea where Linus is, she does know quite a bit about Weapon Brown, as she was one of the people who helped transform him into a killer. A confrontation between the two leads to Weapon Brown slaying her, but not before he drags out of her an idea of where Linus might be: the Pumpkin Patch, the area where the destructive Zinger Bombs which essentially destroyed the world first fell.
After a brief battle with an anthropomorphic and excessively hungry tree — described as an 'arboreal weapon' left over from the Fourth World War — Weapon Brown finally locates his quarry and the woman he has gone so far to rescue.
A brief battle ends with Weapon Brown defeated and imprisoned by Linus, thanks to a quasi-sentient life form Linus has psychic control over (which Linus refers to as his 'Security Blanket'), who is attempting to raise "the Great Pumpkin". Astonishingly, he succeeds, but Weapon Brown breaks free of his confinement and destroys Linus' blanket. Shocked at the death of his weapon, Linus then falls victim to the Pumpkin itself, which kills Linus, Weapon Brown's younger sister, and the woman Weapon Brown has come to save. The sole survivors of the encounter are Weapon Brown and Snoopy, who leave the Pumpkin Patch, their fates from that point on related in the sequel, "Blockhead's War".
A Weapon Brown Christmas
This short story is set sometime before the events of A Peanut Scorned and features Weapon Brown as he ventures into the wastes to find a scrawny-looking tree, whose cells are the cure to a disease contracted by scientists who work for a mysterious conglomerate referred to as the Syndicate. The tree's owner, however, mistook Weapon Brown's comments as meaning that the cyborg was after his son. He is slain in an attempt to protect his child by Weapon Brown, who was himself unaware of how his words had been misinterpreted, as he was unaware that the man he had been speaking with had a child.
Said child is confronted by Weapon Brown when he enters the man's hut to retrieve the tree and upon seeing his father dead, pleads with Weapon Brown to be allowed to go with him, which Brown flatly refuses to do, stating that he already has a pet. He advises the child to stay outside and watch the light show his father had created, saying that "maybe Santa Claus will show up." The story ends with the child, now sitting in the snow as a snowstorm has buried his dead father, singing to himself, with the implication being that he will eventually freeze to death himself.
It's the Great Pumpkin, Weapon Brown
In this short comic, included in the omnibus book, Linus Van Pelt and Sally Brown attempt to summon the Great Pumpkin via a sexual ritual; the horrific "Pumpkin Patch" is the locale.
It's the Easter Mongrel, Weapon Brown This is a short comic featuring a young "Chuck", living by his wits; at the "Daisy Hill Puppy Farm", he battles evil giant rabbits and an immense bird called a "woodie" (a reference to Woodstock), with the help of a puppy, descended from the genetically altered war dogs bred at the "Farm", and takes him home. Shermy, Weapon Brown's friend, appears in this story.
Blockhead's War This long comic series ran over a period of years on Jason Yungbluth's website, and was later collected into an omnibus volume with the other Weapon Brown stories. It follows Weapon Brown and Snoopy as they fight their way across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and ally with Anne (a version of Little Orphan Annie), Pops (Popeye), and The Boondocks characters Hughie and Reilly against the Syndicate, and its Cyber Augmented Legionnaire Version 1.N, a villain who is an adult version of the boy from Calvin and Hobbes. Cal is accompanied by a stuffed toy which can transform into a huge cyborg tiger named HOBS. The story ends with Weapon Brown heading off to new adventures.
Weapon Brown: Aftershock "Aftershock" began posting on November 19, 2019. This semi-sequel sees several characters telling "campfire stories" about Weapon Brown and his exploits in an 'unreliable narrator' context. Each tale is told with a different art style and the Weapon Brown versions of Steve Dallas, Peppermint Patty, Joe Btfsplk and Pops/Popeye are among the tale-tellers. The Patty character's tale involves Weapon Brown's meeting with the Little Red-Haired Girl, an enemy whom he comes to love. The events of "A Peanut Scorned" presumably follow. "Aftershock" ended in 2022.
Cast of characters
The characters and settings of the world of Weapon Brown are intended as parodies of the world of Charles M. Schulz's beloved Peanuts characters. There are roughly 14 characters seen in "A Peanut Scorned" who can be seen and recognized by name and look as Peanuts parodies, and one who is mentioned only briefly, making for a grand total of 15. Several additional minor characters such as Peggy Jean (labeled "Peg-Me Jean") and Harold Angel appear in "Aftershock".
Weapon Brown: The eponymous character from the book and star of all stories save for It's the Great Pumpkin, Weapon Brown, in which he does not appear. Weapon Brown looks like an adult version of Charlie Brown complete with his classic curled hair on his forehead. In the special material added to the story for the Weapon Brown one-shot, Weapon Brown is shown with a full head of hair, rather than the seemingly "bald" look Charlie Brown sports in the original strips and animation as a way to distinguish the character from Charlie Brown, who many people mistakenly think is bald because of the way he is depicted in various media. His resemblance to the classic Charlie Brown is explained by the explosion of a number of "Zinger Bombs" which detonated not far from where he was playing, causing him to be caught in the backwash from the blasts and which also cost him most of his hair, meaning that Weapon Brown, unlike the classic Charlie Brown, actually is mostly bald. He also wears a shirt that is a near-exact duplicate of the one worn by Charlie Brown, though much larger and heavily shredded from years of use.
Weapon Brown has a cybernetic right arm which bears a radiation hazard sign at the shoulder, is powered by a "reactor", and is armed with a "plaz gun", which appears to be a weapon that fires bolts of energy. He also possesses enhanced strength, senses, and reflexes. By the time of A Peanut Scorned, much of his cybernetic arm's interior workings are visible, while it is shown as looking brand-new in A Weapon Brown Christmas. Weapon Brown's first name is revealed as being 'Charles' at various points in the story. The first point is a reference to him by the name "Chuck" by Patty, and later in a dream sequence Weapon Brown starts to refer to himself as "Charlie", only to be cut off by Lucy. Linus later reveals Weapon Brown's name as Charles.
Weapon Brown is one of a number of victims of an organization called "the Syndicate", which was running a super-soldier program called Project Peanuts, which appears to have been intended to create living weapons, with at least two known success stories. Weapon Brown and Lucy both make references to Project Peanuts during the story. While the exact extent of what was done to him is unknown, Weapon Brown claims that they turned him into a one-man army and it is implied that they amputated his original right arm in order to equip him with the cybernetic one he uses from then on.
During a battle narrated in "Weapon Brown: Aftershock", Weapon Brown meets and falls in love with the character known only as The Red Haired Girl, and retires from his life as a killer, taking up as close to a simple life as can be had in the post-apocalyptic world they live in until she is abducted by Linus, which prompts him to take up his old ways in what would eventually be a failed attempt to rescue her.
As with the original Charlie Brown, Weapon Brown owns a dog named Snoopy, and, like the original, this dog in no way resembles a beagle.