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Recontextualizing images

Submitted by John Jones on Wed, 2008-02-27 12:05

The blog garfield minus garfield contains some wonderful examples of the ways in which images can be recontextualized to create new meanings. According to the site

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

Garfield minus Garfield: I'm an empty grocery sack

Garfield minus Garfield: It was horrible I barely escaped with my life

Garfield the strip is mostly lame; but, by removing the dull main character, the strip is completely transformed. I particularly enjoy the empty panels, and the effect their silence has on the meaning of each strip.

via The Comics Curmudgeon

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Comments

Existential Inquiry

Submitted by Jillian Sayre on Fri, 2008-02-29 13:15.

I have to say that I am obsessed with the site and check it daily. Where the old Garfield was, as you put it, pretty lame, Garfield without Garfield is almost touching. You know, vaguely moving in an old French film sort of way. The blank panels, as you indicated, have an aural effect, a "silence" into which Jon speaks, in which he lives. In this way the reinvention is reminiscent of (or maybe just "is") found art that requires of the viewer a reevaluation of what is and is not art, what has and does not have Meaning.

That, and it's funny.

Tribute or Rebuke?

Submitted by timturner on Sat, 2008-03-01 11:14.

To add to this chorus, I, too, find this brilliant and bordering on genius. My question, though, is whether it can be read as a tribute to Jim Davis, or a rebuke? Not that it matters, really (since I feel no particular investment in preserving his ego), but I do wonder. I'm just surprised there hasn't been a lawsuit.

I was wondering the same

Submitted by Jillian Sayre on Sat, 2008-03-01 11:48.

I was wondering the same thing (about a possible lawsuit). In fact, I hesitated to post about the cartoon because I didn't want it take away from me! I think the case can be made (and you, John, and I are all making it) that this is a very different product. Of course, our modern copyright code does not look so kindly upon what Lawrence Lessig calls "Mickey Mouse creativity" as it once did.

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