Comics Blog: 3eanuts

March 31st, 2011

Here’s site curator Daniel Leonard’s note from the site:

“Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.”

A lot of people are comparing to Garfield minus Garfield, but this one has its own charms.

Its own bleak, fatalistic, existential charms.

[via Tom Hart]

Posted in Cartoonists, Experimental Comics
Discussion (11)¬

Kenn McDonald says:March 31, 2011 at 3:52 am

I’ve read this and Garfield minus Garfield. I’d have to give this one the edge. It may just be nostalgia on my part, having cut my comic strip teeth on Peanuts as a very small child, but I think carries so much more weight. Garfield without Garfield can be entertaining. rips my heart out.

Thomas Childress says:March 31, 2011 at 4:36 am

Garfield – Garfield has this wonderfully skewed view of our own neurosis, is just bleak in a black comedy kind of way. However the one with Snoopy pining away for his lost love is depressing, truly depressing. I need a hug…

Jane says:March 31, 2011 at 7:51 am

See, I think that Peanuts’ pathos is augmented – possibly sweetened, but not concealed – by its punchlines, whereas Garfield (the character) usually detracts from the pathos to be found in his own strip. That’s where falls flat for me – where G.M.G. shows us something we haven’t noticed before, shines a torch on what should, at least to any reader that the strip has ever resonated with, be completely obvious.

Morgan Wick says:March 31, 2011 at 11:51 am

The comic in the image is a good example. In the original, Linus just puts his thumb back into his mouth and says “Touche.” Everything in the modified comic is still there in the original. Mind, I have similar issues with Garfield Minus Garfield.

Lee Edward McIlmoyle says:March 31, 2011 at 9:28 am

I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, I always thought that the secret to Schulz’ power and longevity lay in those first three panels, with the promise of the last. Stripped of it, you begin to understand how Schulz really was.

Compared to that, GwG is screwball comedy pitched funny.

SamuraiArtGuy says:March 31, 2011 at 10:14 am

One of the reasons that works so much better than GWG is that Peanuts was a superior and better written strip in the first place. Sorry to say so, but Garfield has been recycling the same gags for over a decade now. It was a much more fun strip in it’s early days. Sparky kept it goin’ on full on right up till he passed way.

Michael says:March 31, 2011 at 1:51 pm

Amen, brother!

Michael says:March 31, 2011 at 1:51 pm

wow, this is amazingly profound in its own ‘end-of-the-world’ sort of way

Theo Macdonald says:March 31, 2011 at 10:19 pm

To me a lot of these strips still feel whole, and communicate the idea I always got from Peanuts in a more straightforward manner. This existentialism is what makes peanuts pretty much the indisputably best newspaper strip ever, vying only with Calvin and Hobbes, which shares a similar maturity.

I agree with SamuraiArtGuy that Garfield was just never as good as peanuts, I’ve never really liked it at all.

Laroquod says:March 31, 2011 at 11:52 pm

This one’s too obvious — remove the punchline from most comic strips and you will end up with something depressing, because comedy is just tragedy with a different ending. is not playing against anything very specific to Peanuts, but rather doing something to Peanuts that can be done to most comedy. Try removing the last act from a Shakespearean tragedy, for example. I am more impressed with Garfield minus Garfield because it was a far less obvious conceptual turn to make, and the results are more genuinely surprising in their peculiarity and message.

Laroquod says:March 31, 2011 at 11:53 pm

I meant to type ‘Shakespearean comedy’ there as you probably guessed reading it.

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