In my previous manifesto, I introduced my definition of “cute” by way of discussing Adrian Ramos’s Count Your Sheep: “small but not picayune; pleasant but not condescending; optimistic but not sugarcoated,” I wrote, then concluded that “cuteness requires an acknowledgment that the world is a rough and scary place but then turns around and decides to smile anyway.”

I’d now like to discuss the work of three more webcartoonists who embody these principles. After all, what good is a nascent artistic movement like “the New Cute” without an accepted canon that can be debated, overworked, vilified and finally resurrected as kitsch a couple decades down the road?

So let’s start with Jeepers by Andre Richard, one of the founding comics over at Girlamatic. At first glance, this one might seem to fall easily into the category of “the Old Cute.” I mean, a rabbit person named Jeepers and her friends living and having adventures in a magical valley, well, I can already see folks reaching for the mental floss to clear away the cloying and pastel visions of My Little Pony that the above description might cause to lodge in and about their metaphorical gums.

But one of the hallmarks of the New Cute is the way it takes symbols, concepts, and imagery from the Old Cute and reworks them. “Reworks,” I say again, not “chucks into a meat grinder.” I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that fuzzy animals slicing each other to bits with chain saws or bunnies spouting obscenities can be pretty funny in the right hands, but that’s not the sort of thing I’m talking about here. The New Cute, y’see, is concerned with taking cute to new and unexpected places but still and always remaining cute.

Jeepers’ best friend, for instance, is a hamster named Spunky, but she’s more of a nihilist philosopher than one would expect to find in the average talking animal fantasy. Out on the beach in one early strip, for instance, she comments on the ocean’s similarity to a hamster wheel: “moving, yet never truly going anywhere.” She gives us a quote from Matthew Arnold’s melancholy poem “Dover Beach” at another point, and one whole storyline centers on her attempts to destroy her supposed fiancee Fred, a hamster so relentlessly cute and cheerful that hearts and flowers float in the air around him.

As is usually the case with the New Cute, the humor here is gentle but has a bit of an edge. The aforementioned Fred is the familiar of Little Witch Girl Mary, and Mary’s teddy bear, Mr. Snuffles, has one eye, four arms, and threatens to destroy Mary should he ever get the opportunity. Blackheart Raven, another of the regular cast, considers herself “thoroughly nefarious,” but her grandiose plans for taking over the world never get much beyond the talking stage.

Like I said, it’s not about dismemberment and destruction here. The New Cute aims to expand the range of what’s considered cute.

Take another example: The World of Mr. Toast & Gags by Dan Goodsell. The only single-panel comics I read, now that I think about it, the two strips focus on the Imaginary World, a place Goodsell has been refining pretty much since I met him in first-year Latin back in high school. It’s a place where anthropomorphic objects like Mr. Toast, Joe the Egg, and the Lemonhead not only walk and talk but also hold down jobs, do science projects for school, celebrate holidays, and generally live their lives.

Again, it’s a gentle place, a place where setbacks exist, but they’ll usually lead to some sort of positive outcome with a little thought or a little luck. The stories here are much more contained than in Jeepers–everything you need to know is usually right there in that single panel–but they boil down the essence of the New Cute and show how it differs from the Old Cute.

After all, the underlying assumption behind the Old Cute is: cute is for kids, so nothing too confusing or too obscure or too thought-provoking need apply. The New Cute, however, chooses to be a cuteness for adults and will go ahead and make references to Nikita Khrushchev, will not shy away from the star-crossed love between Shaky Bacon and a female frying pan or the tension between friends when there’s only one piece of cake left. It’s whimsical–if anyone even uses that word anymore–dry and odd, not the sort of humor that makes a reader fall onto the floor laughing. It’s puns and word-play and other sorts of brain-based humor, but it’s cute. Always cute.

As a third example, I’ll point to the webcomics of the Australian creator Edward J. Grug III–not his real name, but that needn’t concern us here. The important thing for right now is how deeply Grug has been mining the vein of the New Cute.

I only learned of Grug’s work last year when he and I ended up competitors in the Daily Grind contest, but he’s apparently been kicking around the webcomics’ world for quite a while–”The Bizarre Life of Charlie Red Eye,” a strip he co-created over at Modern Tales, debuted in April, 2003, for instance. But for our purposes here, I’ll ask you to go to his LiveJournal or better yet his WebcomicsNation site, pick anything–Theodore Possum, Hugo Henson, Bear and Monkey, his 24-hour comics, even his journal comic–and start reading from the beginning.

There’s love in Grug’s pages and laughter, sure, but pain and pathos and heartbreak as well, not the sorts of subjects the Old Cute cares to–or is even able to–deal with in any real way. The New Cute looks directly at them, accepts them for what they are, and decides to take them on anyway. Not with some noisy and rude confrontation, of course–that wouldn’t be cute at all–but with understatement, gentleness, even silence: Hugo Henson, like Mr. Toast, doesn’t speak at all, if I’m remembering right.

Seeing the world as it is and deciding not to become bitter or burnt out because of it is what the New Cute is all about, and these three strips aren’t the only ones doing it. They’re just the first ones that came to mind when I decided to go into the manifesto-writing business…