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The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

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Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#51
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, Garfield minus Garfield has the same premise, and was mentioned. http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/ Wonder which came first?

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 Si…

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.

Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Well gee, there's a solid argument.

Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#55
post #50
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calvin and Hobbes's creator really liked Schulz's work: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119214690326956694

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

Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#56
post #14

What's with the starting diss of Charles Schulz?

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

I agree that Peanuts isn't funny, but it's darker than it looks. If happiness is a warm puppy in the Peanuts-verse, it's because people are often cruel and hateful, and life is full of endless disappointment. Just like Garfield, really, in that it's supposedly light fare that's deeply melancholic under the surface.

Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#57
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree that Peanuts isn't funny, but it's darker than it looks. If happiness is a warm puppy in the Peanuts-verse, it's because people are often cruel and hateful, and life is full of endless disappointment. Just like Garfield, really, in that it's supposedly light fare that's deeply melancholic under the surface.

I 'read' a friend's compendium of Peanuts and was shocked at the cruel, dark humor of the initial years. It really was aimed at adults until Snoopy started to become more prominent and the strips played for laughs rather than insight into society.

Re: The World of Subversive Garfield Spinoffs

#60
post #29
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 th…

I think The Far Side also stands up relatively well (although of course he retired around the time that webcomics started to take off).
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