You owe Mark a coke.
My all time favourite will always be Googly eyes
Then thereâs Square Root of Minus Garfield
This kind of turns it into Wallace and Gromit.
Jon Arbuckle is cast as a man who carries on detailed conversations with a cat, which is arguably weirder than the idea that heâs merely wildly hallucinating.
You must not have a cat. Going by every cat pet owner Iâve ever met, it would be weird for Jon not to talk to Garfield.
heâs right isnât he SmoochersâŚ
Why not take it a step further and have Garfield Without Anything, featuring nothing but a brightly-colored room (which sometimes abruptly changes color in the middle panel) with a chest-high horizontal plane along the bottom?
Um, yeah. Humans have language. Cats and dogs donât. We talk to them because we like them and want them around. There really isnât anything weird about it. Iâve talked to the cats and dogs Iâve lived with all my life. They DO understand things you say now and again. âWhoâs a nice kitty?â and âNo, you canât go outside right nowâ, spring to mind.
Not to over-analyse this or anything but the âarguablyâ is problematic whilst the strip is saddled with absence of Garfieldness not being the same as presence of not-Garfieldness. Without wishing to go all Greimas Square on everyoneâs ass, the onlooker must still contend with the space (not) occupied by (not) Garfield in each individual frame. Youâd have to redraw the whole thing before you could really argue about the relative weirdnesses.
Or you could use your imagination of course.
But thatâs ⌠thatâs >splutter< every strip cartoon ever.
What have you done?
You can get the same effect by reading every Calvin and Hobbes strip without the last panel.
Yehuda
Also âvetâ and âbathâ
years ago I did a Garfield Minus Garfield Plus Cathy
link here since I couldnât embed it http://goo.gl/pxK3u6
I had a few of these together but this is the only one I can find at the moment
Not to forget auto-translated Garfield.
Thatâs brilliant. Not only because Cathy was always dieting, but I kind of associate both strips together because they were both hugely popular in the 1980s (with lots of merchandise) despite basically being one-joke (if that) strips.
I was about to say, have we gone backwards? Soon weâll start linking people to Bonsai Kittens again as if it were something new.
I first saw this idea at the weird site castlezzt.net (made by some of the paper rad comics folks), which still has a sort of best-of of the Garfield strips hereâitâs mostly just removing Garfieldâs thought bubbles, but it also has a missing Garfield strip and a bunch of ones with weird psychedelic alterations. I always wondered if the âGarfield Minus Garfieldâ guy ripped off the idea from them, since I had bookmarked an old message board post with a bunch of examples from 2006, and wikipedia says Garfield Minus Garfield started in 2008.
