Would the Nermal strips become pantomime?
(From Truth and Beauty Bombs. Er… well, actually, Truth and Beauty Bombs is a blog and forum for several comics, as opposed to being a comic itself. But that’s as may be. Technically, the artwork is from Garfield. Anyway! Click on the thumbnail for the surreality!) By now, many if not most of you will have seen this. For those who haven’t, a fellow called MackJ posted a thesis over on the Truth and Beauty Bombs forum a week and a half ago. You see, it was his belief that Garfield would be funnier — or at the very least, wouldn’t suck so much — if all of Garfield’s dialogue were cut out of the strip. And he posted a number of examples — the art unchanged, Jon’s dialogue untouched, but Garfield’s thought balloons excised. And he was right. It was significantly funnier. It was oddly surreal in places. Darker in others. Solitude and loneliness have driven Jon ’round the bend — and the strip takes on an antihumor dimension. And it possesses an order of magnitude more pathos. Jon is no
