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No. 3856: On your TV, on your album, cassette, and 8-track

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On your TV, on your album, cassette, and 8-track

First | Previous | 2019-12-09 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=3856

Strip by: Tamara Macadam

{Garfield hides in his bed under his covers}
Garfield: I hate Monday... Something bad always happens to me on Monday. It's just a matter of time now...
Garfield: The suspense is killing me
{Garfield now screaming to the heavens}
Garfield: DO IT TO ME NOW, MONDAY! GET IT OVER WITH!
{The strip image is distorted, with heavy desaturation and skew}

The author writes:

I really hope no one else has done this before.

This is the strip from 1982-08-02, converted to audio and put on a real cassette tape, before being recorded off that tape and remade into an image. I'm not sure why it became almost entirely black and white, especially since you can see colours by zooming in.

How I did it:

  1. I took the comic and converted it to a raw file, where three bytes corresponded to a single pixel. (RGB format for those using Imagemagick.)
  2. I imported the raw data into Audacity as unsigned 8-bit PCM audio, little-endian order, 44.1 kHz. This was exported as a .wav file and dubbed onto the tape.
  3. I recorded the audio from the tape back into Audacity, and after making sure the samples were lined up so nothing would have been added, I exported as an unsigned 8-bit .wav file.
  4. After removing the .wav header, it was a simple matter of converting from the raw data into a png using Imagemagick.

Frankly I'm astonished you can even tell it's a Garfield strip. Clearly this needs fine-tuning.

Original strip: 1982-08-02.