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No. 5739: Gapftflb - remorxed, relooted, resorted adn reseividete

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Gapftflb - remorxed, relooted, resorted adn reseividete

First | Previous | 2025-02-03 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=5739

Strip by: Linguanaut

{There is a single blank white panel with the word 'GAPFTFLB' scrawled in it, and a strange squiggly orange shape that might be an animal, because it has eyes, some stripes, and some other indeterminate appendages}

The author writes:

I drew this a while ago, had a bad idea about how to use it, decided against that, and then was reminded of its existence after SRoMG #5254 made its joke about the reducibility of some of the strips on this site. So I thought I would use this thing to make a joke about the reducibility of Garfield strips altogether - if writing 'GARFIELD' can call to mind every Garfield an audience has ever known... what happens when this is presented to an audience that has never known a Garfield? Would it have more meaning than 'GAPFTFLB'? I conjecture that, 'No, it would not, because that is silly' - but you are quite free to disagree with me on that.

That's a lot better than the headache-inducing Notes text I was originally planning to write for this one, I think. Here's the best bit, for reference:

"After the recently serious of stripes, where Garfield is retooled in textile formation rather than by draught of the stripe, and egregiously the recent one in which is mentioned the TV Tropics (a wiki sight, likened the wiki sight Wikipedestrian, the Encyclistpedestrian Brittany of intranet pagers - which is ironing because Encyclistpedestrian Brittany haze its own sight anyway), I wanted to do my owner spine on the jake"

The problem with this, of course, was that it gave me a headache to write and would have at best also given people a headache to read, provided that they both understood all the references and made the connection with the obfuscated and intentionally incorrect ways in which I referenced them. Which works really well if you're writing an in-joke for a school or university newsletter in the 1980s or 90s, is a poor-to-middling idea in most other places, and is roughly the opposite of what works well as humour on the internet. But it does at least sort-of tie in with the point I co-opted this drawing to later make, and that lets me vindicate having had that headache by leaving it here. For all of you lovely internet people! Enjoy :D

Original Square Root of Minus Garfield strips: 2023-10-07, 2015-02-16, 2009-02-23 and the others that built on it.