when we strip Garfield away from the comics, the focus turns to Mr. Jon Arbuckle - a hopeful but awkward and clumsy young man whose lines begin to take a particularly existentialist turn once his cat is replaced with blank space. Garfield Minus Garfield, in its best moments, plays like a 3-panel line from a Samuel Beckett piece. Dan Walsh, responsible for 90% of the material on the site, started to "champion and popularise" the concept and saw his project explode in 2008. a year on, the strips are as darkly humorous as ever.
the work has also been published in a book form, available from Amazon. credited to Garfield's original creator, Jim Davis, the book is a symbol of an intriguing dynamic between appropriator and original creator. instead of refusing the use of his strips, Davis called the concept "an inspired thing to do" in an interview with the Washington Post, and went on to publish the book with a foreword by Walsh. the book features Walsh's material with additional pieces by Davis, and involved a one-off fee offered to Walsh by copyright holders Paws, Inc. to write a foreword "to a book by Jim Davis inspired by Garfield Minus Garfield".
thoroughly blurring the lines between appropriating and creating, one might draw links between this process (appropriating and re-appropriating Garfield?) and the act of re-blogging made easier by tumblr, placing original content at a premium. if there is even such a thing as original content - what does the word 'original' even mean? - as Walsh freely says, "everything is derivative". the legal status of copyrighted property also presents an issue yet to be tuned to the realities of artistic ownership, a fact that some will point out. Jim Davis created Garfield, Paws owns the strip, but to whom does Garfield Minus Garfield belong?
all strips credited to Dan Walsh
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