Cats are Invincible

I love Garfield edits. I think we all do. To my knowledge, the whole craze kicked off at Truth and Beauty Bombs, but the rate at which it spread makes it hard to pinpoint where various edit styles originated.

To my knowledge, the first ones were simply removing Garfield's dialogue and calling it a day. This was pretty amusing, but removing Garfield entirely proved to be much more revealing. This is by far the most popular editing style.

Actually, though, I think the whole, "bringing attention to Jon's horrible life" is best exemplified in Realfield, where Garfield is replaced by a realistic looking cat who doesn't "speak out loud", for lack of a better term. A man going insane is funny, but a man reaching out repeatedly to his indifferent cat is full of delicious pathos.

I like the ones where it gets nonsensical best, though. The randomizer's pretty good, but my favorite like this is Garkov, where the dialogue is generated by Markov chains but the panels appear as published. Sometimes it gets absolutely hilarious.

I invented a Garfield editing technique as well. I remember pretty clearly why I came up with it. Essentially, I was trying to remember how this one Dilbert comic went. In the comic, Dilbert is at a store where two lines have formed at a checkout. He doesn't know whether to go to one or the other, so he stands between both and hedges his bet. Now, there is a panel or two after this, containing the punchline, but I couldn't (and can't) remember what happens in them. I realized, though, that the comic was sufficient without it, and had transformed from Dilbert into some sort of Reader's Digest andictode.

So, I wondered how a comic which already is at that rank of bland quasi-humour would handle the loss of a punchline, and started only reading the first two panels of Garfield strips. This is very easily done if you own the extra-wide collections of them, like I do. All you have to do is fold it in a bit for the ones on the left page, and cover over the far right side with your hand.

What I discovered is that the first two panels of Garfield are excellent. Sure, Jim Davis might only have five punchlines, but he has hundreds of setups. Without having to awkwardly transition them into a joke, the comic simply becomes the realistic adventures of a magic cat and his owner.

I'd post some online but I'm entirely too lazy to go save or scan comics, go into paint, crop out the last panel, and reupload them. It's much easier to do IRL, and it works with every comic.

Anyways try it out and here's some links:
Garkov (Markov chained Garfield)
Lasagna Cat (Sketches and music videos based on Garfield comics)
Garfield minus Garfield