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No. 1856: Garfield and Jon Plus 23 Years

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Garfield and Jon Plus 23 Years

First | Previous | 2014-06-18 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1856

Strip by: Rassilon T. Davies

Classic Jon: The world is constantly changing.
{Classic Garfield is bored.}
{Suddenly, Jon's appearance changes, much to still-Classic Garfield's confusion.}
Modern Garfield: {His own appearance having changed} They haven't stopped making frozen pudding pops, have they?

The author writes:

I knew that the 2001-11-28 strip had been the subject of a running gag, in which the second panel features Garfield replaced by something rhyming with "Minus". I decided to make an edit of the strip that did something else entirely, and this was the result. I got the idea in my head pretty quickly after seeing the original strip and it was pretty easy to edit, there were several 1978 strips that had the right emotions and sizes I needed.

This is my first submission, and from a technical standpoint I learned a lot. The first element that I edited into the strip was Classic Jon's head. I couldn't find a panel that had his head the size I needed (Jim Davis' early art style focused a lot less on faces, especially since he just uses stock images now.) As a result, I had to resize it, and the result is slightly blurry compared to the rest of the strip. Obviously, enlarging should be kept to a minimum.

The Classic Garfields were much easier to edit in, as no resizing was required to get them to look right. I figured out a way to get the added characters to look more like they belong there. Previous tests I'd made suffered from fringing around the edges of added elements, but I figured out that by creating a layer with the blending mode set to "Color", I could paint the background color over the edges, without clipping the characters' black outlines. Of course, if the luminosities of the backgrounds had been different enough, it wouldn't be quite as effective.

(If you're wondering where my Insistent Terminology of "Classic" and "Modern" comes from, I'm a Sonic the Hedgehog fan and those terms are generally used for Sonic's designs by the fandom.)

[[Original strips: 2001-11-28, 1978-06-22, 1978-06-20, 1978-06-26, 1990-12-31.]]

Original strips: 1978-06-20, 1978-06-22, 1978-06-26, 1990-12-31, 2001-11-28.