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No. 4129: Family-Unfriendly Garfield

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Family-Unfriendly Garfield

First | Previous | 2020-09-07 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=4129

Strip by: KelpTheGreat

{Jon is preparing for a date; he is wearing a garish, yet tacky, suit, and perusing a smattering of bottles atop his dresser}
Jon: I'm looking for just the right fragrance
Jon: That, and my personality, will knock women dead
Garfield: Maybe you should try essence of arsenic

The author writes:

Bonus challenge accepted.

I thought of the "arsenic" line pretty quickly as a way to make the original strip even darker, but it didn't quite mesh with the dialogue of the first two panels. First, arsenic isn't a cologne; second, "helpless" implies that someone is still alive. Luckily, I was able to rewrite the first panel to use "fragrance" instead, and there just happens to be a very useful idiom in English, which normally means "impress someone", that I was able to have Garfield interpret literally. Thus, the format and structure of the original joke is preserved almost perfectly, for a much more family-unfriendly version of the strip.

Additional trivia: Having created and submitted this strip the day after the original was posted, I have broken my own speed record that was set by the submission immediately preceding this strip, "Garfield in Doubled Half Time" in Haiku. If only I could show this kind of speed and work ethic in more important areas of my life. >_>

Original strip: 1989-06-01.