Weapon Brown

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 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.

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 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.

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".

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He lost the ability to see with his left eye during the events of It's the Easter Mongrel, Weapon Brown, a story published in the print version of the omnibus.

In the world of Weapon Brown, Franklin is black as in the original Peanuts; he is apparently the only one of his kind, as Patty claims she has never heard of any others.

Much later, during the Blockhead's War story, the characters from The Boondocks, "Hughie" and "Reilly", tell Weapon Brown that a 'bleaching virus' has either killed black people or turned them white.

Marcie: A whore in the employ of Patty, she is seen wearing glasses and little else save for bondage rings in her nipples and a bikini bottom in her only full appearance in the story.

During the events of "Weapon Brown: Aftershock", Patty speaks of a lover who "keeps her bed warm"; this is presumably the Marcie character, who is unseen.

Pigpen: Seen only in a few panels, the character is portrayed as a desolate drug addict, and is first shown speaking to Lucy Van Pelt about Weapon Brown's attack on Schroeder.

In the bonus story "It's the Easter Mongrel, Weapon Brown", enormous Gastornis-like birds called "woodies" pursue a young Chuck, leading to his first meeting with Snoopy.

She was abducted by Linus Van Pelt with the help of Weapon Brown's sister Sally and was unseen throughout most of the story until the final chapter.

555 95472: This minor Peanuts character, whose name was changed to a number by his father, appears as the bartender in the scene where Schroeder is playing the piano.

Shermy: Completely unseen in the original story, Weapon Brown makes a brief mention of him being a bounty hunter, and claims that he disappeared somewhere in "the Pumpkin Patch".

The summoning goes wrong by means unknown, and the creature seems to simply come apart, crushing Linus, Sally, and The Red Haired Girl beneath its mass.

Weapon Brown and Snoopy use the hatch found at the middle of the crater to reach the underground hideout Linus is using in his attempt to raise "the Great Pumpkin" to destroy the world.

In the comic, however, the Syndicate was depicted as evil, and was the source of a great deal of misery for various characters, including Weapon Brown himself as well as Linus.

Horns", the Pointy-Haired Boss from Dilbert and employing the characters from comic strips such as Beetle Bailey, Crock, Mary Worth and Doonesbury.

Its goal in this longer story is to capture a self-sustaining food source known as the shmoo, held by Anne (Little Orphan Annie) and her followers underneath "Bone City" (B.C.).

At the same time period that this discovery is made, Hostess is not that far away from putting them out of business (and was itself liquidated and bought out by Apollo Global in the real world).