What ever happened to the guy who made those? These were so well done. Got me into the GI Joe parodies too. I honestly haven't run into anything on YouTube this good in over 5 years.
They were made by FatalFarm which has done a lot of really great stuff in the last few years, including some absolutely brilliant work for Key & Peele.
Even if Garfield Minus Garfield is a little weird,
I think it's fascinating how the absence of the cat creats such a obscure melancholia.
Some of the stripes even become philosophical.
Or conversely shows how easy it is to make non-sense that can be interpreted as deep or meaningful. Makes me think of India's guru culture or the US's new age stuff. Its like our minds are hardwired to trip a fuse when we see something on the level of zen koan or similarly weird or meaningless. Another example is 'cut up books' where you randomly paste together strips of sentences from other books or newspapers and eventually get something interesting.
Maybe its a side-effect of being a novelty seeking species. Who knows.
I think it's more than that. The Minuses have a definite air that the others, more randomized, don't. I think it's a little Andy Kaufman like - much humor is ultimately malicious, and when you strip out the punchlines, you're left just with the setup in which Jon's loserdom can't be ignored.
Silent Garfield was invented first, on a forum called Truth and Beauty Bombs, which was the fan forum of a webcomic called Dinosaur Comics, though the discussion thereon tended to be only tangentially connected to Dinosaur Comics.
The thread in which it was invented became a big deal and "went viral". I think Garfield Minus Garfield was also invented later on in the same thread, as well as some other variants. But Silent Garfield is funnier and has a better rationale than Garfield Minus Garfield, so it's always to my chagrin that Garfield Minus Garfield is better-known. (That "better rationale" being the fact that in the original, Garfield's "speech" is always shown in thought bubbles, so removing those thought bubbles should theoretically how the strip's events would appear to an outside observer/Jon/anyone without access to Garfield's internal monologue.)
Source: I was there. The PhpBB for the old forum seems to be busted, and I don't think the thread is accessible any more.
DC being what it is, this makes a lot of sense. I only showed up on the xkcd forums, which can go from full of cool people to full of assholes at any moment. It's better now some of the particularly bad trolls have left. Criticising the strip is cool. Being an idiot douchebag isn't.
They have a very different feel. GMG actually modifies the text slightly when it refers to garfield by name and is basically the story of a guy going crazy talking to himself. SG just removes the Garfield lines and answers the question "What is Jon's point of view actually like in Garfield?".
This article is awesome, by the way. I was so addicted to dealing with garfield strips programmatically a few years ago. I wanted to work on a library which could analyze the images, reconstruct the layers and extract the text in order to do things such as removing specific characters, lines, randomizing extracting every single Jon/Garfield sprite and constructing animations out of it, etc.
I feel like Garfield is actually a very cool platform for this because there is a lot of data and not a lot of variations (garfield is extremely formulaic). Maybe this inspires someone to work on it.
(PS: Hint: If you are interested in working on it, scraping every garfield strip off the official website is extremely easy)
I ran across The Dilbert Hole strips embedded in some guy's weird webcomic where he took photographs of Plasticine animal characters and pasted them over photographs of the real world. I can't think of the name of the strip, the only title I remember is "Winter Pageant". At one point the Dilbert strips got replaced with redrawings of them (probably when SA "didn't take too kindly to it") and then I totally forgot about it until today.
There's a decent 5 years of strips in the run of 50 years, scattered but mostly front-loaded, though you also have to skip the first couple. But even the decent strips are low-key and subtle, and you may have needed to be able to connect to some of the characters more than you may have been able too. (I wasn't "Charlie Brown" as a kid per se, but I connected more than others might have.)
I know this because I read them when I was younger, pre-internet. Peanuts can't compete in a world of abundant webcomics. They range from the top to the bottom of quality, but given their sheer quantity, that means there's an awful lot of the "top" out there. The only syndicated strip I know that can stand up next to the top webcomics is Calvin and Hobbes.
(And even then, while the line art stands up, many webcomics' coloring blow away what Mr. Watterson was capable of doing in newspapers. Please note my phrasing on that; I'm blaming technical limitations, not Watterson's ability. IIRC he had some watercolors or something like that he'd done in the back of some of his books... his skill was beyond what newspapers of the day were physically capable of showing.)
I liked Calvin and Hobbes a lot, but it all depends on one's tastes; I make no claim that any of them are objectively 'good' or 'bad'. I do think C&H seems to have a lot more effort and thought behind it than Garfield or many of the Peanuts strips.
I don't feel like I'm going too far out of my way to suggest that a lot of newspaper syndicated strips are objectively bad, because the artists complain about the same issues themselves. They've been boxed in to such a small literal physical area that it becomes hard to do anything "artistic".
A few of them still manage to do some good work, but great work is almost physically impossible now.
And if what you want is merely good work, there's probably a dozen "good" webcomics now for every "good" syndicated comic out there. In fact I think I stumble on a "good" webcomic every three months or so, only to notice that it has 5+ years of archives available. (I do this on purpose; in many cases, the webcomic that is "good" when I find it really wasn't particularly good in the first couple of years.)
I agree that Peanuts isn't funny, but it's darker than it looks. If happiness is a warm puppy in the Peanuts-verse, it's because people are often cruel and hateful, and life is full of endless disappointment. Just like Garfield, really, in that it's supposedly light fare that's deeply melancholic under the surface.
I 'read' a friend's compendium of Peanuts and was shocked at the cruel, dark humor of the initial years. It really was aimed at adults until Snoopy started to become more prominent and the strips played for laughs rather than insight into society.
I read some of the Peggy Jean (Charlie Brown's girlfriend from 1990-1999) strips. It's brilliant comic gold, filled with both hope and cruelty throughout. I don't think Schultz ever played anything for just laughs. His brilliance was he captured all parts of humanity, light and dark, in his strips, even until the end.
Ok, much as I find Charlie Kaufman's films the same, but why bother? Do people not get that you whittle down your audience when you go out of your way to insult things people value.
I read Garfield when I was a kid. I have some books. It's strange but there were characters, a roommate, a dog (odie),a cute kitten that was resented, trips to a farm. Those things were written out, and it became sameness all the time. I'm surprised it's still being written.
I love the remixes. Garfield minus Garfield is fascinating..
It's still being written because Jim Davis's chief motivation in starting Garfield was to do something about the struggling economy in his home town of Muncie, Indiana.
The strip's mediocrity is a secure source of income for two dozen people in a struggling town, and thus also a source of income for everyone who pumps their gas, buses their diner tables et cetera.
This is pretty much the basis of any discussion on jobs creation. In this case there is no destruction of property stimulating economic activity, which to my understanding is the crux of the broken window fallacy.
> In this case there is no destruction of property stimulating economic activity, which to my understanding is the crux of the broken window fallacy.
You have a point there. I think what I'm getting hung up on is that it's not so much a creation of value as a redistribution of value (from the comic strip workers to the gas station attendants, and to the government collecting taxes). Of course, there should be _some_ creation of value involved for the buyers and sellers of the gas pumping service, other wise they would abstain from it, and maybe it is this value that the parent comment referred to, and all is well.
> This is pretty much the basis of any discussion on jobs creation.
Actually, I'm uncomfortable with many discussions of "job creation". It often seems that the number of people hired, i.e. the number of "jobs created", is all that is considered, even if the work done is not useful, meaning that a job-creating action is seen as a success even if it comes at a cost greater than that of just gifting the same people the money and leaving them available for useful work.
Its a town of 100,000+ people with a 6% unemployment rate and a $40,000 gdp per capita. While certainly those extra jobs are nice and that economy is nothing to brag about, I doubt they're making some economy changing effect you seem to be suggesting they are.
For comparison, blacks on Chicago's south side have a 25% unemployment rate and a median income sometimes far below average. A south side neighborhood called Armour Square has a $10,000 median household income. That's $28 a day in income.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELOiYgR2aI