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]

Connor Willumsen is coming from a strange place, but there’s method to his madness.

His experimental webcomic Everett includes some very solid drawing—somewhere between early Moebius, and a young Chester Brown—and his layouts and storytelling are really interesting.

Regarding yesterday’s discussion, Willumsen’s story might fall less into the what-happens-next category and more into the what-just-happened category, but it’s still compelling stuff.

Everett also features some interesting expanded canvas pacing, something I’ve been seeing more of lately, which, predictably enough, makes me happy.

Image from Willumsen’s Blackhold. Thanks to Zach H for the pointer.

Here’s a great flowchart comic about link sharing from H Coldwell Tanner and Roscott.

There should be more flowchart comics! These things are cool.

[link via shidoshi & wohali]

Matt Madden sends word of his latest invention, the Tic Tac Toe Jam!

Anyone want to try it out and post links here?

Some Friday Odds and Ends…

Came across this oilspot by the mailboxes Wednesday. Thanks, humanity, nature, and entropy. Good job there.

Here’s a great cause: Tom Hart (one of my all-time favorite people in the comics universe) is creating a new comics workshop in Gainesville, FL. Here’s your chance to help get it off to a great start!

Here’s a cool sidescroller with some nice art. (link via John Patten)

And finally: Heads up, Stanford University! Looks like I’ll be heading your way on Thursday November 18. More details shortly.

Have a great weekend.

Well it turns out that if you want to make a photocomic, being a great photographer doesn’t hurt. Who knew?

Seth Kushner’s Culture Pop (not to be confused with CulturePulp by Mike Russell) features photocomics of real life characters. Click on the chapter numbers to surf from person to person. It’s pretty cool.

This being Friday, a few odds and ends:

A couple of cool not-comics books in the mailbox this week. I’ve just started diving into Kevin Kelly’s new book What Technology Wants but it’s a fascinating read already. And Andrew Farago’s first book is out, a handsome new Loony Tunes Treasury, with all sorts of fun sproingy extras in it.

Finally, Mike Leung offers a little proof-of-concept experiment mixing words and pictures:

“An adaptation of Swift’s Modest Proposal that gives the reader control of the story progress via common-sense scrolling, can be as light as you can make your image files. and needs no commercial tools to publish other than what it takes to post digitize artwork online.”

Have a great weekend!

Got two emails in the last few days with links to two new webcomics using navigation techniques that neatly sum up this interesting technological moment we’re in.

Turbo Defiant Kimecan by Mexican artist Ferran Daniel uses Flash to load one panel or element at a time. We’ve seen a few comics like it, but this one gets points for some pretty artwork. Curious to hear what people think of this sort of loading order, now that we’ve seen it a few times. (Maybe time to revisit this discussion?)

Meanwhile, along comes an HTML 5 comic, Never Mind the Bullets (cooked up by Steaw Web Design to show off Microsoft’s IE9). More proof-of-concept than anything else, but it’s kind of cool and got me thinking about how that layered effect could be used in other ways. (thanks again to Randy Oest for the tip).

Of course, the real shoot-out going on this year is between file formats, and with the recent back-and-forth in the mobile space over Flash and HTML 5, it’s helpful to have some concrete reminders of the very different creative directions each might take us in.

Impressions?

[Edit to Add: Since both are getting a sound beating in the comments section, I should probably make it clear that neither comic represent more than a tiny fraction of what can be (or has been) done with either Flash or HTML 5, and I’m not endorsing either approach as “the future of comics” or anything. But it’s always interesting to see how many different reading models there are, and even failed attempts can sometimes contain useful ideas.]

Some odds and ends, this being Friday.

Via Kickstarter, news of an 80-foot comic being created for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It seems to be piggybacking on a somewhat old-fashioned idea of the contents of the “comic book medium” [*shudder*], but you gotta give ’em points for the form.

Via Randy Oest, the suggestion that these intriguing experiments with some emerging Web standards might be applicable to comics. It’s a good point. Anyone want to give it a whirl?

Finally, via Ed Spradley, news of the South Korean Ministry of Defense’s efforts to explain their position in the recent alleged sinking of a South Korean patrol boat by North Korea, using a non-fiction comic distributed to school children. The effort is getting mixed reactions apparently, but it’s certainly a striking reminder of how more fully-integrated comics are in the Manwha/Manga culture than here in the West.

Have a great weekend!

Way, way back in the deep recesses of the horrifying guilt-mountain that is my Inbox, I found an old email from one Michelangelo Cicerone forwarding the news of a very cool Historic Tale Construction Kit, which is essentially a Create Your Own Bayeux Tapestry tool. Give it a try if you’re so inclined.

On the night table: Top Shelf’s excellent alternative manga collection AX; Mario and Gilbert Hernandez’s good-old-fashioned twisted comic book adventure Citizen Rex; and Moto Hagio’s lyrical Drunken Dream from Fantagraphics.

To satisfy your weekly Greek webcomic quota, check out the handsomely-drawn Mused by Kostas Kiriakakis.

And finally, here’s an insidious video that’ll burrow its way into your skull forever, courtesy of Warren Ellis. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Have a great weekend.

A couple of new angles on navigation this week. On the Web side, a nicely-rendered side-scroller by Cody Coltharp, and on the mobile side, a tilting viewer by Karrie Fransman & Jonathan Plackett.

[Via comments: The javascript for the side-scroller viewer was written by Jean-Nicolas Jolivet, originally as a panoramic photo viewer.]

From Mexico, a well-told silent comic by Edgar Delgado, using some extended page sizes and storytelling tricks practically designed to make me happy (and maybe you too).

Finally, a moving good bye from Satoshi Kon, a creative giant of Japanese animation whose work I was still in the process of exploring when I heard the news of his death from cancer. I look forward to finishing my journey through his stories. I regret there won’t be any more.

Tokyo Godfathers arrived in the mail yesterday.