Some comics make you smile. Some make you laugh. And then there are comics that make you stare at the final panel for three seconds, whisper “What on earth was that?” and immediately scroll to the next one. Deliberately Buried Comics comfortably lives in that third category.
Created by cartoonist Sean Berthiaume, the webcomic series has developed a recognizable reputation for absurd situations, unexpected punchlines, visual wordplay, pop-culture detours, and a distinctly dark sense of humor. A 39-comic collection published in 2024 offers a particularly good introduction to Berthiaume’s strange little universeor, more accurately, his collection of many unrelated strange little universes.
Unlike traditional comic strips built around recurring heroes, familiar locations, or a continuing storyline, Deliberately Buried Comics can jump almost anywhere. One strip may begin with an everyday interaction, another with an idea borrowed from gaming or fantasy, and the next with something that looks suspiciously wholesome until the punchline drives directly through the guardrail.
That unpredictability is exactly the point.
What Are Deliberately Buried Comics?
Deliberately Buried Comics is an online comic series by Sean Berthiaume built primarily around standalone jokes. Instead of asking readers to memorize characters, relationships, or years of complicated lore, the strips usually provide everything needed within a handful of panels.
That format places the series firmly within the modern webcomic tradition. Comic strips have been entertaining American readers since the newspaper boom of the late 19th century, but the internet removed many of the old limitations involving syndication, page size, publishing schedules, and editorial expectations. Today, web cartoonists can move from a three-panel gag to a longer sequence, change subjects completely, or post something so bizarre that a newspaper editor might quietly slide it into a drawer labeled “Maybe Never.”
Berthiaume takes advantage of that freedom. He has explained in previous interviews that he does not rely on a continuing theme or recurring cast. Ideas may begin with a planned joke, emerge during ordinary daily moments, or mutate into something entirely different while he is drawing.
For readers, this means one important thing: predicting the next strip is basically hopeless.
Why These 39 Comics Feel So Unpredictable
Many jokes work through incongruitythe collision between what we expect and what actually happens. Comedy researchers have discussed versions of this idea for centuries. Your brain builds a reasonable interpretation of a situation, then the punchline suddenly forces you to replace it with something much stranger.
Deliberately Buried Comics repeatedly plays that game with the reader.
A panel might establish a recognizable social situation. Your brain rapidly fills in the blanks. You know how the conversation should proceed. You know what the characters probably mean. You may even think you have spotted the joke early.
Congratulations. That confidence is often exactly what the comic needs before pulling the floor out from under you.
The Setup Looks Familiar
Berthiaume frequently draws from concepts readers already understand: relationships, technology, video games, jobs, animals, religion, movies, mythology, language, consumer culture, and assorted pieces of modern life.
Familiarity makes the setup efficient. A cartoonist does not need six paragraphs of exposition when the reader immediately recognizes the situation.
Then things get weird.
The Punchline Refuses the Obvious Route
Berthiaume has discussed intentionally avoiding easy jokes because obvious punchlines have probably already occurred to someone else. That philosophy explains why the series often seems determined to choose Door Number Four when readers were carefully debating Doors One, Two, and Three.
The funniest strips therefore operate almost like tiny magic tricks. The necessary information is placed in front of you, but your attention is encouraged to move in the wrong direction.
Dark Humor Without One Fixed Formula
The phrase dark humor comics can suggest nothing but death jokes and relentless misery. Deliberately Buried Comics is broader than that.
Some strips certainly wander into macabre territory. Others depend more heavily on absurdism, uncomfortable implications, sarcastic observations, literal interpretations of familiar expressions, grotesque surprises, or innocent situations becoming unexpectedly inappropriate.
The darkness is therefore less of a rigid genre requirement and more of a permission slip. Almost nothing is guaranteed to remain respectable.
A seemingly normal character can become ridiculous. A cultural reference can be stretched until it breaks. A harmless expression can suddenly be interpreted literally. Even the basic rules of reality are negotiable if violating them produces a stronger punchline.
It is cartoon logic at its most mischievous.
Simple Artwork Helps the Joke Move Faster
In short-form comedy, artwork has an unusual job. It must be visually interesting without delaying the joke.
Deliberately Buried Comics generally favors readable character designs, clear expressions, straightforward panel composition, and enough detail to establish the situation quickly. The art supports the comedy rather than demanding that readers spend five minutes inspecting every background brick.
That economy matters.
Classic newspaper strips demonstrated how much storytelling can fit inside a tiny sequence of panels. Modern webcomics inherited the same challenge while gaining more freedom over dimensions and pacing. A talented cartoonist can establish location, characters, conflict, expectation, and punchline faster than many writers can finish clearing their throats.
Berthiaume’s strips frequently exploit that efficiency. The cleaner the setup is, the more room the final image has to cause trouble.
Pop Culture Is Material, Not a Crutch
Another recurring ingredient is the use of familiar cultural material. Games, fantasy conventions, entertainment tropes, superheroes, famous stories, and recognizable pieces of internet culture can all become raw material.
However, the better jokes do more than say, “Remember this famous thing?” Recognition is merely the opening move.
Good parody changes context. A heroic concept may be subjected to painfully ordinary logic. Fantasy can collide with bureaucracy. A familiar character archetype may encounter consequences that its original fictional universe conveniently ignored.
That contrast lets Deliberately Buried Comics attract readers who enjoy both geek culture and comedy without turning every strip into an endless parade of references requiring seventeen browser tabs to understand.
Why Dark Humor Can Be So Satisfying
Humans have always joked about uncomfortable subjects. Soldiers, medical workers, emergency responders, comedians, writers, and ordinary people have all used humor to create psychological distance from things that might otherwise feel overwhelming.
Research on humor and stress suggests that laughter can temporarily reduce tension and help people reframe stressful experiences. That does not mean every dark joke is therapeutic, nor does laughing magically solve serious problems. Context, audience, and intent matter enormously.
Still, there is something appealing about briefly transforming fear, awkwardness, frustration, or absurdity into a joke.
The effect is particularly powerful in comics because drawings create an additional layer of distance. We are not watching actual people experience some nightmare. We are looking at invented cartoon characters inhabiting a fictional scenario where reality can bend in service of a punchline.
That little bit of separation gives creators more room to venture into uncomfortable territory.
Dark Comedy Still Needs Boundaries
Of course, “dark” does not automatically mean “funny.” Cruelty without cleverness is still cruelty wearing a novelty hat.
Humor specialists often distinguish among styles that connect people, help individuals cope, attack others, or turn hostility inward. The difference matters because a joke can invite people to laugh at the absurdity of existenceor simply select a vulnerable target and start throwing tomatoes.
The strongest Deliberately Buried Comics tend to succeed when the target is an idea, expectation, fictional situation, social convention, or absurd piece of logic rather than when shock value is expected to perform all the work.
Surprise helps. Craft helps more.
Why Standalone Webcomics Are Perfect for Internet Culture
There is another practical reason comics like these spread easily online: they are wonderfully portable.
You do not need to begin at Chapter One.
You do not need a character wiki.
You do not need somebody whispering, “Actually, this makes more sense if you’ve read issues 126 through 184.”
A standalone strip can appear in a social feed, be understood within seconds, and be shared with a friend immediately. This makes short-form comics especially compatible with Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, and other platforms where audiences encounter creative work individually rather than chronologically.
The Library of Congress has even created dedicated collections preserving webcomics, recognizing the format as a meaningful part of contemporary comic art. Internet comics are no longer merely newspaper comics that escaped onto laptops. They have developed their own pacing, visual conventions, distribution systems, communities, and sense of humor.
Deliberately Buried Comics belongs naturally to that environment.
What Makes the 39-Comic Collection Worth Reading?
A gallery containing 39 standalone strips could become repetitive surprisingly quickly if every joke used the same formula. Berthiaume avoids that problem by changing subjects constantly.
The collection moves through multiple kinds of comedy: visual gags, puns, dark implications, pop-culture riffs, bizarre transformations, social observations, and punchlines that appear to have arrived from another dimension without filing the appropriate customs paperwork.
Not every strip will land equally for every reader. That is normal. Humor is unusually dependent on personal experience, cultural knowledge, timing, and individual taste.
But the rapid variety means a joke that leaves you completely unmoved can be followed seconds later by one that catches you defenseless.
And those are usually the memorable onesthe comics that make you scroll back upward because your brain wants to verify that the artist really went there.
The Experience of Reading Deliberately Buried Comics
Reading a large batch of Deliberately Buried Comics is different from following a conventional comic series. There is no emotional investment in whether a hero defeats a villain or whether two characters will finally get together. Instead, the pleasure comes from repeatedly entering tiny narrative traps.
After several strips, you begin reading defensively.
A character says something ordinary and immediately you become suspicious. A second character enters the frame and you start scanning for hidden details. Something wholesome happens and alarm bells begin ringing because surely nobody came to Deliberately Buried Comics for an uninterrupted celebration of healthy communication.
The funny part is that expecting the twist does not necessarily help.
You may correctly predict that something will go wrong without having the slightest idea what form that wrongness will take. It is like knowing somebody has hidden a rubber snake in your house but discovering they actually replaced your refrigerator with a goat.
That repeated tension between anticipation and surprise creates a satisfying reading rhythm. Setup. Suspicion. Escalation. Disaster. Next comic.
The Best Approach Is to Avoid Overthinking
One enjoyable way to read the 39 comics is simply to let each strip perform its trick before analyzing it. Trying too hard to predict every punchline can turn entertainment into an SAT examination nobody requested.
Read the setup naturally. Let your brain make assumptions. Give the comic permission to fool you.
Then, if a particular joke works especially well, scroll back and examine how it was constructed. Often you will notice how carefully the earlier panels encouraged a specific interpretation. The final panel feels random at first, yet the most effective jokes usually contain enough internal logic that the surprise makes strange sense once revealed.
Sharing the Comics Adds Another Layer
Dark humor is also interesting socially because reactions differ so dramatically.
Send the same comic to five friends and you may receive five entirely different responses: uncontrollable laughter, a confused question mark, an explanation of the reference, an accusation that you need professional supervision, and one person who replies six hours later with an even darker meme.
That variability is part of the entertainment.
Online comic communities have always thrived on conversation surrounding the artwork. Readers reinterpret punchlines, identify references, debate whether a joke crossed a line, and occasionally discover a completely unintended second meaning. A comic may occupy four panels, but the discussion beneath it can stretch for hundreds of comments.
Repeated Reading Reveals the Importance of Timing
Another useful experience comes from rereading favorites. Once the surprise is gone, you start noticing timing rather than outcome.
Why did the artist need three panels instead of two? Why was a particular expression shown before the punchline? Why was one piece of information withheld? Why does the joke become less funny if you explain it in a paragraph?
Comics demonstrate that comedy is often an exercise in information management.
Reveal too much and the audience arrives before you do. Reveal too little and the punchline feels meaningless. The sweet spot is giving readers exactly enough information to construct the wrong answer confidently.
That skill is one of Berthiaume’s strongest weapons.
It Is Also a Reminder That Weirdness Has Value
Perhaps the most enjoyable lesson from spending time with Deliberately Buried Comics is that creative work does not always need an elaborate mission statement.
Not every cartoon must explain society, resolve an emotional trauma, introduce a marketable mascot, or become the foundation of a cinematic universe with fourteen sequels.
Sometimes the goal can simply be to draw something strange enough that another human being laughs.
That freedom gives the series much of its personality. Berthiaume can abandon one concept after a single strip and explore something completely unrelated next. Instead of forcing every idea into an established universe, he allows each joke to build whatever tiny universe it needsand then usually destroys that universe before the reader has finished getting comfortable.
For fans of unexpected comics, absurd humor, visual jokes, and punchlines with questionable moral navigation skills, that unpredictability is exactly what keeps the collection entertaining.
Conclusion: Expect the Unexpected, Then Expect Something Worse
39 Comics With A Dark Sense Of Humor From “Deliberately Buried Comics” showcases what Sean Berthiaume does particularly well: turning familiar situations into miniature exercises in comic misdirection.
The series combines accessible artwork with standalone storytelling, pop-culture references, wordplay, absurdism, and darker jokes that frequently depend on surprise rather than pure shock value. It belongs to a long tradition of cartoonists using a few panels to expose strange contradictions in ordinary life, while its unpredictable structure feels perfectly designed for the modern webcomic era.
You probably will not love every joke. You may not understand every joke immediately. A few may cause you to question both the artist’s imagination and your own decision to laugh.
That is part of the charm.
Deliberately Buried Comics does not promise comfort, continuity, or sensible behavior. It promises that whatever you think is about to happen probably is not.
And sometimes, particularly after a long day of perfectly predictable real-world nonsense, a beautifully unpredictable piece of fictional nonsense is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Note: This article is an original editorial analysis based on publicly available information about Sean Berthiaume, Deliberately Buried Comics, webcomic history, cartoon storytelling, humor theory, and research on laughter and stress. It does not reproduce the original comics or source articles.
