This isn’t really a webcomic recommendation, but rather an encouragement to check out an adaptation. (It’s been a couple of years since I last did that.) We Bare Bears is the latest original series from Cartoon Network, and they did a bang-up job with the limited material they had in the first place.

The reason I’m not discussing its webcomic first is because there’s a reason I stated “limited material”–there isn’t much to discuss regarding the webcomic itself. The Three Bare Bears was a very short-lived webcomic created by Daniel Chong. You can read the archive here. The comic is about three bears who get into silly antics, and…that’s it. There’s not much to talk about because of how short the archive is–there were barely a dozen strips before Chong decided to pursue his career in animation. He worked with Pixar and Illumination Entertainment (Despicable Me franchise) for a while, then eventually decided to adapt his characters into an animated short, which won him an award at the KLIK! Animation Festival in Amersterdam. This impressed Cartoon Network enough to pick it up for a full series, and what I’ve seen for the first few weeks of premieres can proudly sit alongside CN’s other stellar hits from the past five years.

We Bare Bears centers around the three same characters from the comic: Grizz, an outgoing grizzly bear who desires fame and friends; Panda, an introverted panda bear who browses the Internet and is awkward with social connection; and Ice Bear, a deadpan, no-nonsense polar bear who speaks in the third person and has impressive fighting and cooking skills. The bears try to blend into human society at the San Francisco Bay Area and hijinks ensue. The premise is simple and basic, yet the writers have gotten a lot of mileage out of this setting. The characters bounce off each other very well, and it leads to hilarious, and at times, heartwarming moments. (Check out the episode “Burrito,” the most famous episode in the season thus far.)

This series was already recently greenlit for a second season, despite being relatively new, and that’s an indication of the show’s quality: there’s no reason not to check this series out. We Bare Bears premieres every Thursday at 6:30PM on Cartoon Network, and you can watch previous episodes on Cartoon Network’s website.