I just heard about this interesting website. The website has a bunch of Garfield comic strips but the creator of the website has erased Garfield from the strips. Here is some quotes from a news story about the website:
“The result takes Jim Davis’s cartoon and strips it of the famously fat feline. All alone, Jon Arbuckle, Garfield’s owner, looks manic at best and depressed at worst. And Walsh’s fans seem to like it that way: The site averaged about 300,000 views a day in late February.
“The one resounding piece of feedback I’ve received is that people feel Jon’s loneliness and desperation is just like theirs, but that his crazy antics makes them laugh at it,” Walsh, 32, writes in an e-mail. “Sometimes the world can feel like a pretty intimidating place, and it takes someone like Jon to remind you to lighten up and laugh at the hopelessness of it all.”
One of Walsh’s occasional readers is Davis, who heard about the site a few months ago. The cartoonist calls the work “an inspired thing to do” and wishes to thank Walsh for enabling him to see another side of “Garfield.”
“Some of the strips were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier,” Davis says.
Walsh may start having trouble finding the lonely, depressed Jon for his comics. Davis recently created a girlfriend for the longtime bachelor.”
Link to story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040303083.html
Link to website: http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/
