The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs | Hacker News Reader

The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

theawl.com

180 pointssamclemens73 comments

No, this is the best Lasagna Cat, complete with FF6 mod:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELOiYgR2aI

Wow, that Jim Davis tribute was impressive. And had a nice little jab at the guy right at the end :)

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.

Most of their work is online: http://fatalfarm.com/

They have a series of "alternate TV intros" you need to watch right now:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92CAF6B8AE655C2C

The "Ducktales" one is the best. Probably NSFW.

The Ducktales one is definitely the best, I can no longer hear the theme music without thinking of it.

The Robocop one has got to be the absolute boundary of what is allowed on YouTube.

FWIW, DJ Douggpound (Tim & Eric, Pound House, et al.) did some editing and voices on those. His new stuff is brilliant -

https://youtu.be/sNhB9dr9U0c

YES! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ2q9NmYf6g&list=RDyELOiYgR2...

PVP did a sendup of the whole industry http://www.pvponline.com/comic/2009/03/02/ombudsmen

That was brilliant, thanks for posting!

Surprised no one has mentioned Rick and Morty yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM_XPZH6QE0

In a video I never would have expected to be on topic here, see also "Gazorpazorpfield Minus Gazorpazorpfield": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R56aB9GxAzM

The mere fact that somebody did it is more amusing than the final result.

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.

It's beautiful.

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.

>when we see something on the level of zen koan or similarly weird or meaningless.

Zen koan are anything but meaningless. They are in fact purposefully designed to evoke certain meanings...

Garfield Minus Garfield plus 4chan is weirder still

https://m.imgur.com/a/0AAA5

I'm surprised Silent Garfield wasn't mentioned: http://www.silentgarfield.com/

Weird, Garfield minus Garfield has the same premise, and was mentioned.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

Wonder which came first?

At least in Silent Garfield Jon is talking to something instead of nothing which leads to hilarious and depressing scenarios.

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)

My favorite, very similar in premise, is realfield: https://www.tumblr.com/search/realfield

I dunno, I'm laughing at the random generator more than the real strip. For example:

http://www.bgreco.net/garfield/?panel0=1988880216&panel1=199...

http://www.bgreco.net/garfield/?panel0=1983830415&panel1=198...

http://www.bgreco.net/garfield/?panel0=1994941217&panel1=200...

Yeah this one's my favorite too.

"Barfield Loses His Lunch" has a special place in my heart, but I can understand why it never appears on these parody lists.

http://www.thereverend.com/barfield/index.html (kinda NSFW)

I always found Silent Garfield the best (and actually fairly amusing).

There's also this crudely drawn but shockingly engrossing series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKuF51aPFaq-2UvU-HkS...

As well as all the follow-ups and side stories by the same person (check their channel for the rest).

Why even bother, when Jim Davis himself is already as existential-despair as you can get?

http://youtu.be/mMz-2oUDSas

Jesus H. Christ that was horrifying and I'm not sure why.

This reminds me of The Dilbert Hole, a profane take on Dilbert's watercooler mirth.

Scott Adams didn't take too kindly to it.

If you can find the strips and aren't easily shocked it's quite the interesting read.

It's just profanity. I wouldn't bother.

The Dilbert Hole ruined Cards Against Humanity for me... it's just too tame in comparison.

Also, MRA Dilbert - Dilbert with quotes from the author himself.

http://mradilbert.tumblr.com

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.

That sounds similar to leisure town http://www.leisuretown.com

That was it! Thank you!

And of course, the XKCD: https://xkcd.com/78/

And Kate Beaton: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?id=134

What's with the starting diss of Charles Schulz?

Some people (myself included) find Peanuts insufferably boring and not all that funny.

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.

Perhaps there are individuals that don't feel the need to cater to a broad audience?

Try http://3eanuts.com/ which is Peanuts with the last panel cut off.

Wow, some of those are absolutely astounding.

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.)

Calvin and Hobbes's creator really liked Schulz's work: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119214690326956694

Yeah, I know, but I guess I don't share his view on that.

I think The Far Side also stands up relatively well (although of course he retired around the time that webcomics started to take off).

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.

Once you realize that he was America's greatest absurdist, it's breathtaking.

Also, the collection Chip Kidd designed is a great doorway into understanding how it could have become so popular. [1]

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156.Peanuts

Which diss?

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.

> and thus also a source of income for everyone who pumps their gas, buses their diner tables et cetera.

I'm not sure, and I have other things to think about right now, but this smells of a broken-window fallacy.

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.

Well gee, there's a solid argument.

It's meant like "do you guys also feel the weird smell in here?".

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.

It's possible he just cares about those specific dozen or so people

And of course, Hetfield the Cat, http://hetfield-the-cat.tumblr.com/

The best musical analog I can think of to this would be Simpsonswave (as compared to the whole of the vaporware genre).

retest

Amazing- someone found a way to post memes on HN and get upvoted :)

(Garkov is very HN, I admit)

This seems like perfect fodder for an RNN.

Cool, but if you've seriously been on the web for about 5 years, this is nothing new.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com