parakkum

Heidi MacDonald reports in The Beat today that the Garfield-minus-Garfield strip, which has been living in my RSS reader for a while, is coming out in book form.

If you haven't seen it, Garfield Minus Garfield is Dan Walsh's remix of Jim Davis's comic that removes the strip's namesake from the strip (as well as Odie and almost everyone else), leaving simply Jon Arbuckle and his lonely observations about life. Here's the NYT quote:

[the strips] “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.”

Naturally, this is a huge copyright violation, but apparently Jim Davis also thinks it's pretty funny, so Random House -- the publisher of normal Garfield books -- will publish a book showing in parallel a series of G-m-G strips and their unmodified sources.

Pretty cool. We'll give Jim Davis the final word:

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”