Oh, Subverted World

The Comics Issue

by Patrick Rapa

There was an unwritten rule for this, City Paper's second annual Comics Issue: No subversions. Maybe we should have written it down. It only would have taken a second.

Subversions are what you call it when somebody takes somebody else's thing and, like, makes it "edgy" or "disturbing" or "self-aware."

Garfield subversions have been popping up on the Web for years. The Garfield Randomizer creates a new comic by mixing three previously seen panels. Garfield Lost In Translation runs the dialogue through a Google translator from English to Chinese and back to English. Garkov applies a "probabilistic model" to create a "semi-coherent text synthesis." And, of course, there's Garfield Minus Garfield, wherein a lonely Jon Arbuckle talks to himself. (That one just got a book deal, with Jim Davis' blessing.) Post-modern commentary. Deadpan ridicule. You get the point.

Now, we got close to 100 submissions, and only a couple of them were straight-up subversions, both taking on another popular and innocuous target: Family Circus. And you know what? We laughed a little bit. (Those and pretty much every other submission we got for this issue can found here.)

But for the actual tree-killing edition of CP, we tried to pick comics that blew our minds, made us laugh, or conjured up simple little situations. We gave points for originality. We didn't penalize for crude drawing skills. (Although a number of entries were entirely the wrong shape and size. People.) In the end we had to whittle it down to five pages of stuff we really, really dug. Of course, now that they're out there, you're welcome to re-caption, mistranslate and otherwise screw with them. Maybe add Garfield in there somewhere.

(pat@citypaper.net)