694: Peanuts Plagiarizes Pearls

Explanation
This strip was inspired from a lesser running gag from Square Root of Minus Garfield where Garfield "plagiarizes" another strip's dialogue wholesale, Peanuts being a frequent victim in that gag. Here, the frequent victim of the original gag is actually the one doing the plagiarizing, in this case from Pearls Before Swine; the respective strips' first ever published strips are involved, with the first Pearls ' s dialogue transplanted into the first Peanuts and a few dialogue bubbles repointed for coherency.

Had 633: The First Week not made iToons readers aware GoComics had the first week of Pearls Before Swine strips missing, odds are this strip's dialogue would be completely different due to a would-have-been mistaken belief that 2002-01-07 was the debut Pearls. The iToons strip in question was given credit as the source of the Pearls dialogue because of this.

The strip was designed alongside a not-yet-published strip designed for Square Root of Minus Garfield that inverts the running gag, in which another strip swipes the dialogue of the first Garfield. That strip went to Square Root of Minus Garfield instead of iToons due to deriving too much (in this case, a wholesale script) from Garfield.

Two versions of the strip were created during development and submitted as part of the package, one in the original black-and-white and the other using the colorized Peanuts Begins version. While the original black-and-white Peanuts credited, the version derived from the Peanuts Begins colorization was the one actually published.

Note: The credited date of the Pearls Before Swine strip is wrong; the correct date is 2001-12-31.

The author writes
Imagine a universe where Charles Schultz actually didn't have a single creative bone in his body, and resorted to plagiarizing comic strips that debuted nearly two years after he died, anachronism stew be darned...Is your mind blown enough yet?

Original Pearls Before Swine strip: 2001-01-31 [sic ] (via iToons #633). Original Peanuts strip: 1950-10-02.

Transcript
{Charlie Brown is trotting down the street} Shermy: "What are you watching?" Charlie Brown: "The Bullfighting Channel...Nothing but bullfighting 24 hours a day." Shermy: "That's a lot of bull." Patty: "You never know what's gonna set that guy off."