“Charley says..."
When I was working on Lost In Space 2 I showed a friend of mine one the above pages from Barry The Alien and The Messenger in The Black Hole Bar and Comedy Club. He then asked me if I had stolen the idea for the language difference from C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars.
Nope. Barry The Alien’s first comic book appearance came in my 1995 mini comic The House of Hatch, the inspiration for which came from one of those public information films aimed at children which were on the telly quite a bit in the 1970s. In Barry’s case it was “Charley says…” an animated cat warning kids of the dangers of messing about with everything from a box of matches to strange men in the local park asking if you’d “...like to see some puppies?”. The complete “Charley says…” can be seen on YouTube here. My 1995 Barry The Alien strip was basically “Charley says…” in space.
Having just read all 26 volumes of the utterly brilliant series The Complete Peanuts by Charles M Schulz it’s certainly worth mentioning that Schulz used the same conceit back in 1967 when he introduced the character of Woodstock to Peanuts. Whether this was a first in comics or not I don't know, but Schulz certainly used it to great comedic effect.
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