The Retooling of Garfield

My friend showed me this great project today (I guess you'd classify it as a webcomic) where this guy takes the Garfield comics and makes some specific changes. He decided Garfield would be a more enjoyable comic without Garfield in it at all. The result is Garfield Minus Garfield, in which all traces of the lasagna loving cat are photoshopped out. It actually took this change for me to realize what a depressing person Jon is, although, I'm sure I'd have noticed if I were actually reading the comics on a regular basis as an older person. And it's that exaggerated hopelessness that actually makes these bizarre mutations work as comedy, at least from my perspective. I actually find many of these hilarious.

This struck me as interesting because it's an original way to remediate - if you can even call it that - where you merely take away from the original using new(ish) technology, instead of expanding on it. But by taking something away, the comic has been taken to new heights. It's now about a Jon Arbuckle who is apparently schizophrenic, bi-polar, and so on. And maybe he always has been, but now it's even more pronounced, because there isn't that smug-looking orange tabby to distract us from this incredibly unstable human being.

You can get to the archive, (which isn't very big so far) by clicking the link above. Here are a couple of my favourites: