» About     » Archive     » Submit     » Authors     » Search     » Random     » Specials     » Statistics     » Forum     » RSS Feed     Updates Daily

No. 290: Create.swf Garfield

First | Previous | 2010-03-05 | Next | Latest

Create.swf Garfield

First | Previous | 2010-03-05 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=290

Strip by: Kimiko Muffin

Jon: Hi, there... I'm Jon Arbuckle. I'm a cartoonist, and this is my cat, Garfield.
Garfield: Hi, there. I'm Garfield. I'm a cat, and this is my cartoonist, Jon.
Jon: Our only thought is to entertain you.
Garfield: Feed me.

The author writes:

This is the first Garfield strip, recreated using the Touhou Character Creator, better known simply as create.swf, plus a little bit of image manipulation (I had to turn the cat orange and give it stripes). It's a sort of "digital paper doll" tool created by KirbyM and Thefre, allowing you to create comics and images using characters from Touhou Project (such as my own creation).

Touhou Project is a semi-obscure series of Japanese video games (though in Japan, it's popular enough to have its own conventions) made by a single guy known as ZUN, belonging to the "danmaku" or "bullet hell" genre of shoot 'em ups (you know those games where you play as this spaceship or airplane pointed straight up on the screen, and you have other spaceships or monsters or aircraft whatever pointed straight down at you? Okay, now replace them all with cute girls and fairies), in which enemies fire gigantic swarms of "bullets" which the player must navigate rather than dodge. At the time of this writing, there have been twelve games in the main series, four official spinoff-games, a few official comic books and prose works, and the series now has over a hundred named characters who have appeared here and there.

The big thing about Touhou, though, is the sheer number of fan-creations out there. Fanart, fan fiction, lots of remixes of the games' music, loads of manga, dolls and figurines, video games of every description, at least one pen & paper RPG, and even a few animated works (mostly music videos). Even KirbyM's creations have become widely-known among Touhou fans in Japan. Touhou fans have basically collectively done just about everything creative it's possible to do (except possibly architecture and marble statues, and I'm sure it's just a matter of time). And now, a Touhou fan has used their creativity to recreate a Garfield strip.

Of course, the series has a nearly-all-female cast, which made it difficult to find a good hairstyle for Jon. Believe it or not, that was the most masculine hairstyle I could find in create.swf (and it isn't even one of the ones belonging to one of the three males)! Jon also uses a computer here instead of an easel, which is a reference both to the fact that this very comic was created entirely digitally with no non-computerised components whatsoever, and to the fact that create.swf doesn't have an easel in it.

Original strip: 1978-06-19.