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Here's my annotations. Feel free to expand.
PANEL 1: Note that, while Leatherface is narratively running toward Charlie Brown, he appears in perspective to be in front of Charlie Brown and actually running away from him. The conflicting perspective initiates us into the defiance of norms the story is preparing to explore. Of course, such "incorrect" perspective is also the hallmark of artist Pablo Picasso, who is generally believed to be Denfeld's great-uncle. Also if importance is that seemingly random "A" up in the corner. It is, on one level, a distillation of objectivist philosophy; Not even "A is A," merely "A." It will also figure into the final panel of this piece.
PANEL 2: The hand becomes "realistic" when severed from Charlie Brown's cartoon body. Bodily injury is a "real world" situation encroaching on the more traditionally innocent and unchanging cartoon world, and the incongruity is pointed out to us.
PANEL 3: The last panel gave us violence, and this one gives us profanity. This panel appears to show a Peanuts frame as a museum piece. This is a parody of 1980s superhero comics, which added superficial depth (and notice the canvas is 3-dimensional!) via violence, sex and profanity in an attempt to be "sophisticated" "art".
PANEL 4: The word boxes with mixed case lettering are done in a pastiche of MAD Magazine. It uses the original art, however, so it suggests that a parody of "The Invisibles" is indistinguishable from the real thing.
PANEL 5: 2 fingers are raised, 3 fingers are down. Put together it is 23, a magicqk number (Source: "Anarchy for the Masses")
PANEL 6: Remember the "A" in the first panel? The letters in this panel are upside down, showing that the narrative has become topsy-turvy over the course of these six panels, a final summation of the piece's themes. Indeed, where before we had a realistic situation imposed on a cartoon, here we have a crude, cartoony shirt imposed on a somewhat more realistically rendered comics figure. But this defiance and reversal of expectations is liberating to the confining world of comics, and our protagonist can finally fly. |
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