3eanuts
March 31st, 2011
Here’s site curator Daniel Leonard’s note from the 3eanuts 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 3eanuts 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
March 3, 2021
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 3eanuts carries so much more weight. Garfield without Garfield can be entertaining. 3eanuts rips my heart out.
Garfield – Garfield has this wonderfully skewed view of our own neurosis, 3eanuts 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…
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 3eanuts falls flat for me – where G.M.G. shows us something we haven’t noticed before, 3eanuts shines a torch on what should, at least to any reader that the strip has ever resonated with, be completely obvious.
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.
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.
One of the reasons that 3eanuts 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.
Amen, brother!
wow, this is amazingly profound in its own ‘end-of-the-world’ sort of way
To me a lot of these 3eanuts 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.
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. 3eanuts 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.
I meant to type ‘Shakespearean comedy’ there as you probably guessed reading it.
Theo, I’m not sure that Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes are the “best comic strip of all time.”
Thimble Theatre and Krazy Kat. I’m just saying. All four are in my top five though.
Nerd talk, sorry.
I am enjoying 3eanuts, but I do understand the perspective voiced by Laroquod and Morgan. I wouldn’t call them “concerns” in my opinion. Both 3eanuts and Garfield-Minus-Garfield are examinations, critical responses and explorations of their respective subject matter. I appreciate both experiments for what they are and what they say about the subjects.
Whether 3eanuts is too obvious or Garifield-Minus-Garfield mines a poor artistic field don’t really factor in my enjoyment of either.
But I’m not trying to say that as though I’m scolding others for what they’ve posted here. DOES THAT MAKE SENSE? I don’t know. JEEZ, COMIX.