I don't have anything in particular to say, so here's something random.

I don't get any newspaper anymore, but when I did, I would compulsively read the comics pages every day. More accurately, I would read the maybe five comics that were occasionally sort of funny, and do my best to ignore the other ninety percent of the page. If my eye came to rest on a Momma or BC by accident, it would usually set off an hourlong rant that would wind its way all the way from profane speculation about the character and intelligence of the newspaper readers that might like such a thing, to questioning how the cartoonists carry on year after year in the knowledge (they must know) that their product is crap, to an indictment of the publishing industry in general, which is so spectacularly failing in its only remaining mandate, which is to provide the critical eye that filters the few tiny nuggets of gold out of the enormous river of trash that the interwebs happily provide. This would happen probably about once a week.

(Aside: I probably would think that crappiness was intrinsic to newspaper comic strips, and read none of them, if it hadn't been for Calvin and Hobbes.)

Nowadays, I only read comics in an appropriately cynical and postmodern format, which is one of a couple of web sites that reproduce newspaper comics for purposes of ridiculing them. It was on one of these that I found a link to the Garfield Randomizer.

The Garfield Randomizer is a brilliant web page that takes random panels from random strips and assembles them in random order. Because the Garfield universe offers a total of about five drawings and three jokes, the randomized strips are about as coherent as the originals. But because the timing formula (setup, wasted panel, unfunny punch line) is destroyed, you actually feel engaged in trying to find a story, and possibly even a joke:

Read a bunch of these, and a whole new little world emerges. The random jumps in scenery, and especially the many wordless panels that are just space fillers in the originals, leave the impression of great lapses in time or space. In this context, Garfield and Jon's only real enemy appears to be the meaninglessness of their appallingly empty lives. So it's unsurprising that Garfield has developed a severe mood disorder:

And Jon is either paranoid schizophrenic, or else he really is being relentlessly pursued by Homeland Security for no conceivable reason:

Either way, he's about a hundred thousand times more interesting than the Jon in the originals.

Try it yourself, if you can find a working Randomizer from the link above. (The sites keep getting sued or cease-and-desisted or whatever, but The Man will never win as long as some other joker is willing to copy the javascript and put it up for a while.) I guarantee you'll make dozens of hilarious comics all your own, or your money back.

31 Jan 2008 03:15 PT - persistent link - trackback - 2 comments