About

Three Word Phrase is a webcomic created by Ryan Pequin, who is also a storyboard artist and writer for Regular Show. The style has been described as ironic and surreal, hitting "the nice sweet spot between the zen professionalism of PBF and the unhinged id of KC Green’s comics."^[1] Pequin describes the name "Three Word Phrase" thusly:

It's kind of a joke about how a lot of webcomics have names that are made up of three word phrases, and also it’s kind of a dumb self-referential thing (“three word phrase” is a three word phrase). It doesn’t really mean anything beyond that, though.^[2]

Origin

On November 6th, 2010, Pequin uploaded the first comic to threewordphrase.com,^[3] called "Gon' Eat Ya" (pictured below).

Spread

Three Word Phrase quickly gained popularity. In 2011, the comic was written up in a Buzzfeed community post,^[4] reviewed by One Punch Reviews,^[1] and endorsed by Fountains of Wayne singer Chris Collingwood.^[5] A few of his comics became their own separate memes, including "President Bird" and "I Want This Because of Reasons" (shown below).

The comic gained over 330,000 notes on Tumblr^[6] (as of August 5th, 2016) and helped the comic achieve its peak in popularity. Three Word Phrase was named one of the ten best webcomics of 2011 by Paste Magazine.^[9] On April 11th, 2012, Comics Alliance^[10] wrote an article praising Three Word Phrase. Meanwhile, more of Pequin's comics gained hundreds of thousands of Tumblr notes.^[7]

Pequin has published three Three Word Phrase books.^[12]

In his 279th comic, Pequin announced that he had been hired by Regular Show and that he would be updating Three Word Phrase more sporadically.^[8]

As of August 5th, 2016, Three Word Phrase has over 18,000 likes on Facebook.^[11]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References