We try to pick out the rare fantastic websites - every week a new website put on show. This week: How to rate a cartoon in which the main character disappeared.
"O
h boy, not another blog! It's getting a little boring. Dude, can't you come up with anything new? Hey look, he's trying to make it interesting by choosing a cartoon blog. Not really surprising, I'd say. Cartoons (or rather drawings) have been produced for the last 10000-whatsoever years - round about. This is not gonna sweep anyone off their feet."
People of this opinion might think the matter over after visiting the website and preferably reading this webtip. However, let me drop a word on Garfield first. "Garfield?" the critical audience might ask but we'll see about that in just about a sec.
Jim Davis' Garfield debuted in 1978. Since then, the title role Garfield the cat struggles with not only pet-like problems but also with his owner Jon Arbuckle as well as with the dog, Odie, and other minor persona. Garfield has become the cartoon strip published most often worldwide and is thereby well known among readers of all ages.
Imagine one would take away the main character or rather all the characters but a single last man standing. This is what Dan Walsh did when he created the GarfieldMinusGarfield website. The mentioned last character in this case is Jon Arbuckle.
In the original strips, the unsuccessful cartoonist Arbuckle is pictured as a standard suburban, working class man rivaling with his cat for the sovereignty in the house. I guess I'm not spoiling any plot if I mentioned that the pet mostly wins this fight. Now, after the strips were photoshoped, the very true inner Arbuckle is revealed.
Lacking the former opponent, the cartoons do not lose any of their humor. There is even a much deeper between-the-lines content added by just picturing Arbuckle. It becomes clear that the former dominance of Garfield kept the human from going totally crazy. Now that Arbuckle is all alone, his dysfunctional side becomes more and more obvious.
It is even more striking, considering that Walsh did not change anything about the plot, the order of the pics or the speech bubbles of Arbuckle. The only thing Walsh did was deleting everything else but the human and his paranoid, partly schizophrenic moods as well as his callous, dull indifference towards all the stones life puts in his, now lonely, way.
GarfieldMinusGarfield depicts an everyday man, an everyday man without his cat, an everyday man without his cat but with a whole lot of problems. Obviously, this whole thing is fun. On the other hand, it raises questions about the dysfunctionality of mankind and the outcome of loneliness.
By the way, just in case some of our dear readers are still nudging about the website of choice this week. Feel free to post any website which you want to see put on the spot. No fear, no shame - of course, you will not be forced to write a webtip yourself (however, you're most welcome to do so if you wish to), but any input of interesting, funny and outstanding online material is absolutely appreciated.
Achtung: Bevor du kommentierst, erinnere dich bitte noch einmal an deine gute Erziehung. Hab keine Angst, wenn dein Beitrag sinnentleert ist. Das kommt vor. Aber sei kreativ!
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Da der Microsoft Internet Explorer nicht den weltweiten Web-Standards entspricht, wird WOOLING.NET im Internet Explorer bis Version 6 noch fehlerhaft dargestellt. Alle Fehler konnten wir noch nicht beheben. Das betrifft vor allem Textausrichtung, Linien und Abstände. Um WOOLING.NET in voller Schönheit genießen zu können, legen wir euch ans Herz, den Internet Explorer zu aktualisieren oder am besten gleich kostenlos zu 
