Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=439
Strip by: qvaak
Garfield: Sigh.
Garfield: I have no life...
Garfield: Jon has no life...
Garfield: Odie has...
[SFX]: Slurrp slurp slurp slurp slurp slurp slurp
Garfield: Veeeeeery little life left.
The author writes:
Administrator Note: This submission was too large and complex to fit into a standard SRoMG comic page. Please visit this page for the complete experience.
While Garfield laments the lifeless living he and his surroundings are leading, the strip explodes into life ... Conway's Game of Life, to be exact.
The Internet offers wonderful possibilities for panelled storytelling, but sadly such possibilities are often excessive - only artsy gimmicks providing no substantial value while seriously injuring the ease of reading. Is this value-added version better than the original? Nah. You need a wall-sized monitor to get the strip to even work properly (I use 1024×768 view and it is totally unwieldy) ... And of course the strip simply did not really need any strange introspective depths.
For a long time I've wanted to create (or should I say "deliver") a Conway's Game of Life strip for Square Root of Minus Garfield. First I thought I'd just divide a Garfield strip into two colour layers [turning RGB channels into black, white, and three shades of grey gets you 12 two-colour pictures that can be re-composed with very little loss in quality] and run them through cellular automaton transformation, but that did not seem to comment on anything on either Garfield or comics in general (or popular culture or nerd culture or... anything). However overcomplex and deconstructive that was, it was just an arbitrary effect. I think this one has a bit more idea behind it.
Original strip: 2001-10-28.
