The Oatmeal: How Twilight Works

The whole thing won't fit on this here blog, but this brief analysis of Twilight is the best comic you're going to read all day.

Hat tip to friend of the Twitter Knittaplease.

Kathy. Ack: What actually goes on behind my face when I'm being fucked?

Cathy is not a very funny comic strip. The writing of Kathy Acker could, in contrast, be quite funny. But if you put the two of them together, as this brilliant person here does, the result is far funnier than either of them ever were on their own.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy: Do you have any regrets, Charlie Brown?

Friend of the blog, or at least the Twitter feed, Alex brings word of Peanuts Minus Snoopy, which I guess was sort of inevitable in the wake of Garfield Minus Garfield. The genius of Garfield Minus Garfield, of course, is that it changes the focus of a terrible comic and in so doing makes it a pretty great comic.

In Garfield the focus is always on Garfield: Garfield likes lasagna; Garfield likes to crush spiders; Garfield likes to torture dogs; Garfield likes to mock his owner; Garfield thinks he's way funnier than he actually is; etc. Removing Garfield shifts the focus of the strip onto Jon Arbuckle, whose pathos had always been obscured by the wisecracking of his dumbass cat. And so the comic becomes something genuinely different and smarter and better.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy, on the other hand, takes a great strip and turns it into...something slightly less great.

Unlike Garfield, Snoopy isn't really the focus of his strip. Peanuts is an ensemble; Snoopy is an important player, but Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and Sally are all just as important. And so removing Snoopy doesn't change the focus of the comic in the way that removing Garfield from his eponymous strip does. Peanuts is about the struggles of childhood. Peanuts Minus Snoopy is...about the struggles of childhood.

This isn't to say that Peanuts Minus Snoopy is a disaster or anything. Far from it. It's an interesting experiment. It puts a finer point on some of the non-Snoopy relationships. It provides some pretty decent surreal humor. But it isn't as good as the originals. More often than not, it just feels like a pretty good comic strip that's missing something.

Mutts and A Softer World: Adventures in melancholy.

An installment like the above makes it pretty clear why Charles Schultz was such a big fan of Mutts.

I have to believe he would have liked A Softer World, as well, had he ever gotten the chance to read it.