If you haven’t visited the “Partially Clips” Website previously during its half-decade of existence or read the strips in the newspapers where it’s syndicated then I fear you are about to lose about an hour of one of your first working days of 2007. The idea is simple and strict, so strict that Rob Balder, the creator of the site, publishes the rules of his own game, perhaps to publicly commit himself to them. Each strip has three frames. Each frame contains the same piece of clip art. All Balder allows himself to change are the words accompanying the images or emerging from the mouths and minds of the subjects.

The jokes are a neat demonstration of how constraints on creativity can result in something genuinely subversive. Balder even forbids himself running jokes, probably one reason why the subject matter ranges so widely. If you browse through the strips then I’m sure you will find yourself mailing one to a friend with an “I saw this and thought of you”. I’ve already sent this one to risk engineer Tim Newman and this one to raised-in-the-US-Midwest social software consultant Jackie Danicki. Some more of my favourites from the recent output of “The Webcomic for Adults” are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.