Brandon Notices

Yesterday, I found a German Garfield book at Value Village. Now, being a huge Garfield fan (I have all of the first 36 Garfield books) and a student of the German language, I was excited to come across this. The book was bagged with a half dozen other German books that I really wasn't interested in, but the employees refused to sell just the one book, since they were all bagged together.



Obviously, that's the English version on the left, and the German version on the right. They are both book 14, and they contain the same strips. But the covers are wildly different! The English book is titled Garfield Swallows His Pride and the German version is called Garfield läßt nicht locker which translates to "Garfield Doesn't Give Up." These are very different titles!




I was surprised that I was able to understand the first strip in the book, posted above. Perhaps it helps that I'm familiar with the English material, though. The strips are almost entirely literal translations of the English versions.

According to Wolfram Alpha, a typical translation to German is 10% longer than the original English source, which means more letters. Accordingly, you can tell that the font size in the German Garfield strips is smaller, to accommodate more letters in the same amount of space.




Like in the English version of Garfield (and nearly every other comic), the German version of Garfield capitalizes every letter. This is worth noting because the German letter ß (eszett, or sharp s) exists only as a lower-case letter. If you want to capitalize "ß", you turn it into "SS". So words like "weiß" and "Spaß" become "WEISS" and "SPASS", as in the strip above.

I also noticed that the German Garfield strips remove Jim Davis's name, the copyright info, and the date from the strips. The playground strip above seems to be an exception, though—it looks like they forgot to remove the date.

And now, the fun part: ONOMATOPOEIAS!!!



Interestingly, but not surprisingly, onomatopoeias (or sound words) are different in different languages. German for "scratch" is "kratzen", so I can see where "KRIIIETSCH!" comes from. It's odd, though, that I imagine a different sound in my head when I read both comics.



Garfield's trademark SPLUT! sound becomes the even more comical FLATSCH! Something else they changed in this panel is the lettering on Garfield's bowl. It says the same thing, but the letters are different. (This is a lot easier to see if you scanned the books and were flipping through the images.) It's not a big change, so I wonder why they bothered redoing it.

Anyway, now I have to collect all the German Garfield books too.

I was fiddling around with my Garfield Randomizer recently, and turned it into something completely different: the Garfield Shifter!! It takes a random Garfield comic and either puts the first panel at the end of the strip, or puts the last panel at the beginning.

I'll admit that most of the time, the results aren't very impressive, but every once in a while, you'll get something that seems to defy causality...



...or something that changes the punchline...




...or probably something just plain bizarre...







The Shifter doesn't totally shuffle all three panels; it merely shifts them all. It never generates a strip that maintains the original order. You can tell which comic used to be the middle one because it doesn't have the black outline that the other two panels have.

I used to have the Garfield Shifter available online, but I'm sorry to say that it's no longer available.

Check out these eight Garfield comics:










AUUUUGH!
Jim Davis! What are you doing??

The first six comics are all from the same week in November of 2006. The seventh is from last September, and the eighth is from today. There is something in common between all eight comics:

"We're bachelors, baby."

Running gag, or creative genius running out of jokes? I have been of the opinion that Garfield reached the peak of funniness in the mid-'90s or so, and hasn't really been as funny since. Recently, it seems to have been picking up a little, but it's repetitive stuff like this that I'm afraid will tire me out.

I'm wondering why Liz thinks their house is messy. I hardly ever notice any clutter. Indeed, all we ever see in nearly every Garfield comic these days is a basic horizontal line representing the edge of the table or floor, and usually nothing else. Garfield will occasionally scratch the chair or the drapes, but Jon usually has them replaced by the next day.

And why is Garfield only now pointing out that they're bachelors? The word "bachelor" was hardly ever tossed about before Jon and Liz started dating. Why start now? Once they get married, you're going to have to stop using your new catchphrase, Garfield.

Sigh... and Garfield didn't even do his cute head tilt today.

In honor of all these comics, I have designed one of my own:

I was reading Here Comes Garfield, the comic book adaptation of the first Garfield TV special, when I noticed something odd. In the course of the story, this scene does absolutely nothing to forward the plot, and was probably included only to allow the audience to watch Garfield indulge, but it just doesn't make sense. Please click the thumbnail to read a few pages.

Garfield smells food in the middle of the night and goes downstairs to play with it and eat it. The big question is why there is food set out on the table overnight. We can see after Garfield crawls out of his bed that Jon is asleep in his own bed. So why did Jon leave all this food out? He left out a block of Swiss cheese, some eggs, a huge bowl of potato salad, spaghetti, an entire ham, and a pan of lasagna, among other less perishable foods.

There's nothing in the story to indicate that Jon became so tired that he went to bed without cleaning up after his humongous dinner. Garfield hasn't hassled Jon since breakfast because he was out all day teasing the neighbors and lamenting that Odie got captured and taken to the pound.

It's possible that Jon left this food out for Garfield because he figured he would be hungry, not having eaten since breakfast. But I doubt that. We'll just assume that Jon is not used to having to put food away because Garfield usually eats it all anyway.

When I was searching my computer for pictures to put on my bulletin board, I came across a few Garfield comics.

People on the Internet have done some really crazy things to Garfield comics. The first weird thing is removing Garfield's thought bubbles. This changes it from being a comic about a geeky, losely man and his snarky, pissy cat into a comic about a deranged loser who talks to his cat.

It turns this:


into this:


A bunch of other messed-with Garfield comics are available at the Truth and Beauty Bombs Forum.

Something else that's funny to do with Garfield comics is to randomly select panels from different comics and combine them into one crazy, far-out strip. Sometimes, they don't make a lot of sense:


Sometimes, they do make sense, or at least create very surreal comics:






As you can see, I've had a lot of fun playing with the Garfield Randomizer. The only thing I didn't really like about the Randomizer is that it was apparently designed to only pick panels from comics between 2001 and 2004. I tweaked the code so that picks from nearly all of the comic strips (1979 through 2007). The only problem with this is that the artwork sometimes changes dramatically through a randomized strip, and you'll even sometimes see a panel that isn't colorized. But I suggest doing this if you dare to see the most absurd comics in your life. If you want to see the entire strip of one of the panels, right-click on one of the panels and click Save Background to save the entire strip to your computer.

While I'm at it, I think I'll mention the Garfield search engine. This is neat to use to find specific phrases in a Garfield comic. Search for "Irma" and you'll see all my favorite comics that take place in the diner.

I found a bulletin board in the garage, and I had a little spare time today, so I decided to put a bunch of fun junk on it to snazz up my room. Mostly, it's Far Side comics from the daily calendar I had last year, but there's a few other comics up there, along with other stuff. When I find something funny, I'll just staple it onto the board, over the stuff that's already there.


You can click the picture for a closeup. I'm going to add a few keychains, too.

At about 8:30 p.m., Mom, Dad, Kevin, Stephanie, and I left home to go to Target. While there, I bought a pack of Garfield Trading Cards. I got four cards: one of Lyman, one of the movie version of Arlene, one of the entire Garfield cast, and one with the Garfield and Friends TV show on it. I also got a window cling sticker!

Then we crossed the street to the Grand Cinemas to get a 10:00 p.m. ticket to Garfield. Of course, we got there at 9:00, so we had to wait a while. Mom, Stephanie, and Kevin seemed to spend a lot of time in front of the concessions stand getting a huge bucket of popcorn. Dad played a racecar arcade game, and I made sound effects (the game was muted). On our way to see if we were allowed to be admitted into the theater, I ran into Bryan. He had just gotten out of the 8:00 showing of Garfield. I asked him what he thought of it, and he said something about it not being as good as he had hoped. Before we were admitted into the theater, Stephanie tried to catch popcorn in her mouth, but failed miserably...

Oh, and Stephanie thought it would be fun to bring the stuffed Garfield I got for my birthday. She held it in her lap during the movie.

Then we entered the theater. We sat through a slideshow of advertisements for perhaps 20 or 30 minutes before the movie began. There was also some short Ice Age thing about a squirrel with nuts who fell and almost got killed by a nut or something. Then the movie started.

It was a pretty good movie. I understand that Arlene couldn't be pink—otherwise, it would look unrealistic—but Nermal's voice was waaaaaaaaaaay off. Nermal's supposed to have the soft, cute, high-pitched, annoying, childish kitten voice. I guess I'll say that the book is better than the movie—it has more details and tells more than the movie does. However, the train scene was much more fun to watch in the movie. I was laughing throughout it. I guess I'll be buying the DVD... Eleven thumbs up. That's right. Not as good as Harry Potter...

Stephanie's in the living room right now, trying to catch popcorn in her mouth. I just heard Kevin say, "I think it's the throwing, and not the catching, that you're having trouble with."

I learned the Garfield Club Song. It's sung to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat:

Eat, eat, eat and sleep,
Kick a dog or two.
Snack attack or nap attack,
What's a cat to do? (Hey!)

Well, that's the official Garfield Fan Club Song. Oh, and here's the secret handshake:

Touch right hands with scratching gesture while making a hissing sound.

At lunch, I got my Matchmaker results. Apparently, I should like Samantha Hart the most... Hmm... It also said that I'm "Active, Dramatic, Confident." It says the girl I am least compatible with is Lisa Skipton, a senior. I don't know who she is, so I guess I hate her. At the bottom of the results says, "HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! LOVE, AUDREY AND JOE!" Who are Audrey and Joe? This is too confusing.

Today, we went to the GOOD theater in Alderwood to watch Cheaper by the Dozen. What an annoying movie. C+ It has NOTHING to do with the book. What a nice theater. We should go there more often, except the woman sitting behind me kept kicking my chair, and the kid in front of me kept distracting me because he was balancing a cup on his head.

GREAT NEWS! At the theater, I learned there's going to be a GARFIELD MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's scheduled for June 25 (I think June 19 is more appropriate, but whatever).

Well, I went online and had Dad order me a Headphone Adapter for my Game Boy Advance SP. I think it's stupid that it doesn't come with a headphone jack built in. While I was at their website, I remembered that my Nintendo Power subscription needed to be renewed, so I also had Dad renew my subscription online. As a gift, I'm getting a Mario and Luigi t-shirt! I'm so excited (because I love that game, so I guess I'll love wearing the shirt).