In what is surely the best repurposing of a comic strip since The Nietzsche Family Circus, some clever scamp on Tumblr has removed Garfield from Garfield and the result is alienation, despair, loneliness and madness, just like all the best comics! Be amazed.
14 comments:
Wow, PSP. Thank you for these. They make existence slightly less painful. And Garfield way funnier. And Nietzsche Family Circus--oh my!
Garfield has long been a subject of the *-chan Anonymous crowd. Not sure I saw any Garfield-less Garfields emerge from that community, tho. This is pretty typical of their treatment... they do much cruder stuff with the comic, but this sort is by far my fave motif from the source.
[Beware, while the link above was worksafe when I viewed it, the vast majority of the site it's from is way not so.]
The earliest instance I've seen of this is from the Truth and Beauty Bombs forum, which is associated with a few of my favorite webcomics.
Garfield minus Garfield is what the underground comics about loneliness, alienation and boredom aspire to be when they grow up.
It's actually more amusing coming up with your own not funny stuff the erased Garfield would think than reading what Jim Davis actually has him think.
But art isn't art until Princess Sparkle Pony has made it known to us.
We love you, Princess!
Hahah. They're quite esoteric. Something worthy of a post-modern art exhibit if you ask me (I'm being serious). That and John looks like he's having a psychotic episode in every strip. Good times.
Suddenly, it's the best comic strip ever!!!
Oh man, I like that!
I wonder what Mary Worth would look like without Mary Worth? The same?
Mary Worth without Mary Worth . . . I can see it, actually. You have to keep her meddling platitudes intact, however, and leave them as free-floating word balloons.
Would such words be construed as third person omniscience, born of the collective unconscious of a bodiless "narrator?" Maybe they'd be seen as internal monologues symbolic of the Superego of the denizens of Santa Royale? Or perhaps the words would hover, Delphic, in the air, the divine fire-traced words of some pitiless, yet eminently sensible deity, goading his flock ever towards soul-numbing beatitude.
Nah, they'll probably still sound like they come from some nosy old lady with sensible shoes and knee-high stacks of wisdom-imparting and constipation-relieving Reader's Digests next to the crapper.
The more I think about this, the more I like it. As we know, Garfield the cat doesn't speak, even in the world of the comic strip Jim Davis created. Everything is in thought balloons. And yet, sometimes Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle reacts to these thoughts as though he can hear them.
You see, he really is psychotic, even in the original bland, unfunny version of the strip. But in Garfield Without Garfieldm we are force to stare into the pit of his existence without any lasagna loving crutch.
Brilliance.
"Being and Nothingness" is a J-P Sartre book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
If you need a Nietzsche book, you might try "Thus Spake Zarathustra".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Friedrich_Nietzsche
...just sayin'.
orlando furioso
The Comic Strip Doctor covered "silent Garfield" (there, but not thinking aloud, as if he were a true cat) in a critical essay that also covered other attempts to recontextualize comix.
If there's anything I can't stand, it's a pompous asshole. Where, pray tell, did I say that "Being and Nothingness" was written by Nietzsche? Oh, right! Nowhere!
Fuck off.
PSP, an anonymous pompous asshole is worse than one who signs his pompous asshole name.
:)
P.S. You're so pretty when you're angry!
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