cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Brilliant Bit of Art I've been alerted to the existence of something wonderful and brilliant today. It's this thing someone came up with called 'Garfield Minus Garfield.' The creator takes Garfield comic strips and uses Photoshop or something to edit out Garfield. So that it's all just Garfield's owner, Jon Arbuckle, talking to himself. Fuck Garfield. Seriously. What a shitty, dull, repetitive comic strip. The only thing worse is 'Cathy.' However, when you remove Garfield from Garfield you get something really profound and hilarious. Garfield Minus Garfield turns Jon into a much more complex character. Instead of a man who is tormented and held back by his fat, orange cat, he is a man tormented by his own failures and inability to form relationships with other people. It's like Charlie Brown all grown up, if everything went horribly wrong for him and his friends were all gone. It has that Peanuts existentialism, without the sense of hope and social support that the kids in Peanuts possess. Linus has his blanket. Charlie Brown has Linus and Sally. Sally has her big brother to look out for her. Schroeder has his talent and the fawning admiration of Lucy. All of them have some type of neurosis or another, but it's ok because they have each other. Garfield Minus Garfield represents the horror of being that neurotic in a total vacuum. The whole thing is totally brilliant. I worked on the book a bit yesterday. I really need a day alone for that. It's tough to do that right now with the race to get the workshop dried in. 11:03 - 2008-04-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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