
The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs - samclemens
https://theawl.com/the-weird-wonderful-world-of-subversive-garfield-spinoffs-8d5d7a5bad99#.al1qfk1sw
======
jboggan
No, this is the best Lasagna Cat, complete with FF6 mod:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELOiYgR2aI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yELOiYgR2aI)

~~~
Yhippa
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.

~~~
evan_
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/](http://fatalfarm.com/)

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

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92CAF6B8AE655C2C](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL92CAF6B8AE655C2C)

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

~~~
jboggan
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.

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

~~~
fenomas
That was brilliant, thanks for posting!

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

~~~
jerf
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R56aB9GxAzM)

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

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jecyll
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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
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.

~~~
aab0
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.

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scrollaway
I'm surprised Silent Garfield wasn't mentioned:
[http://www.silentgarfield.com/](http://www.silentgarfield.com/)

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

[http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/](http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/)

Wonder which came first?

~~~
dri_ft
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.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKuF51aPFaq-2UvU-
HkS...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHKuF51aPFaq-2UvU-
HkSMbOKhWdHy7Dw)

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

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

[http://youtu.be/mMz-2oUDSas](http://youtu.be/mMz-2oUDSas)

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

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

Scott Adams didn't take too kindly to it.

~~~
phjesusthatguy3
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.

~~~
neekered
That sounds similar to leisure town
[http://www.leisuretown.com](http://www.leisuretown.com)

~~~
phjesusthatguy3
That was it! Thank you!

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onetwotree
And of course, the XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/78/](https://xkcd.com/78/)

~~~
Cpoll
And Kate Beaton:
[http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?id=134](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php/index.php?id=134)

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protomyth
What's with the starting diss of Charles Schulz?

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

~~~
jerf
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.)

~~~
davidw
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.

~~~
Uhhrrr
Calvin and Hobbes's creator really liked Schulz's work:
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119214690326956694](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119214690326956694)

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

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acomjean
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..

~~~
ocschwar
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.

~~~
Bromskloss
> 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.

~~~
ssalazar
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.

~~~
Bromskloss
> 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.

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DrBazza
And of course, Hetfield the Cat, [http://hetfield-the-
cat.tumblr.com/](http://hetfield-the-cat.tumblr.com/)

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

~~~
regrex
retest

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

(Garkov is very HN, I admit)

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caf
This seems like perfect fodder for an RNN.

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qwertyuiop924
Cool, but if you've seriously been on the web for about 5 years, this is
nothing new.

