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No. 793: Carrot, Sneaky Carrot, and Double Carrot; or, My Dream Submission

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Carrot, Sneaky Carrot, and Double Carrot; or, My Dream Submission

First | Previous | 2024-04-06 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=793

Strip by: Wibi

{Garfield sits indifferently against a nondescript white background.}
Garfield: Milk...
{Zoom out. Garfield (now choppily resized) is in one of the windows of a castle overlooking a black-and-white landscape. Occupying most of it is a large blue tank-robot with two skull heads, henceforth named Two Skull.}
{Garfield gestures enthusiastically out the window. The dialogue balloons appear in reverse order.}
Garfield: Welcome to my castle! Come one, come all to see my magnificent castle!
Two Skull: I don't see that much impressive about it.
{A panel with a "pro-tip" in a red box.}
Pro-tip: Don't forget to brush your teeth and eat your carrots.
{Back to the castle. Garfield looks frightened.}
Two Skull: As a matter of fact, I might just take this castle for myself. What say you?
{Suddenly, Jon appears at the top-left of the panel, levitating.}
Jon: Hey guys! What's new with you?
{In the gutter between this panel and the next is a barely visible carrot next to some text.}
Gutter: Sneaky carrot!
{Two Skull shoots lasers out of its right skull that explode on contact with Jon.}
SFX: BOOM
{Jon is dead. Garfield smiles.}
Garfield: You said it, pal. Crystal Pepsi rules!
{A panel with a "pro-tip" in a green box.}
Pro-tip: Whatever you do, do NOT click this leaf!
{The pro-tip has an arrow pointing to a badly rescaled "clubs" card suit.}

The author writes:

On the night of March 27th, 2024, I had a dream that started with me waking up and checking my email. I saw that manyhills had replied to a Square Root of Minus Garfield submission of mine with "LOL. Published!" I had apparently submitted it last night and completely forgot about it, and I didn't even put anything in the body of the email, so it was just the strip title and the attached strip.

This is, roughly, that strip. Some liberties were taken to make it vaguely coherent, but these parts are solid:

The strip was titled "Carrot, Sneaky Carrot, and Double Carrot". The carrots referred to in the title all appeared or were alluded to in the comic somehow. In the dream, I intended to make the leaf at the end pop up a second comic when you clicked on it, to fulfill the "double carrot" part, but obviously you can't do that without collaborating with the admin to add an HTML imagemap, so I didn't.
There was "Two Skull", a blue Mega Man boss (the large kind you find in the castle part of the games) who was about the size of Guts Tank, and had two skulls for heads. It was clumsily pasted in straight from the official art. Two Skull is not, in fact, a real character.
The strip was way too wide.
The background of the strip was ripped straight from an xkcd comic with a castle overlooking a landscape. (Which doesn't actually exist, so I had to draw it myself.) This means this comic is technically an xkcd edit, just of a nonexistent xkcd.
Garfield was edited into one of the windows of the castle, and conversed with Two Skull. Garfield on the right, Two Skull on the left. In the dream, I may have made an effort to have the dialogue flow naturally, or not.
The "pro-tip" panels appear almost exactly as I remember them, including the badly rescaled clubs icon in place of an actual leaf.

Everything else is probably an embellishment, though a particularly hazed embellishment that I came up with shortly after I woke up. The result is somewhat like a Mountain Time comic with the gusto of Pokey the Penguin.

Back to the dream. I checked SRoMG, and sure enough, there was my comic, having skipped over the buffer entirely. This was odd, I thought. Let's go see what's new on xkcd.

But when I loaded the page for xkcd, I was baffled. The website design was different (plain rectangles instead of outlined rounded rectangles, and somewhat darker background colors) and the entire archive had been wiped. There were now only 2 comics, one of which was a terrible MS Paint drawing, and one of which was actually a video; it was a TikTok of a slug edited to put Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes on top of the slug, and he was saying some dialogue from a Sunday strip where he was exploring a canyon.

Below the comic was a link to the about page, explaining what had happened. Basically, Randall Munroe was approached to turn xkcd into a syndicated comic (something he has joked about before), and he got so angry that he removed everything about xkcd that was marketable or had any appeal - the entire archive. He said "You guys think I'm a genius cartoonist and a genius aerospace engineer [referring to his career at NASA], so you're in no place to be mad. You should be trusting me on this decision."

Suddenly, it dawned upon me. manyhills published my submission right away because it was topical -- my extremely crude xkcd edit reflected what Randall had actually turned xkcd into, without my knowledge! My inadvertent premonition must have made him think I was some sort of quick-witted comedy genius.

Apparently Randall's decision to trash xkcd was made abruptly while he was on an airplane flight. I would have read the entire page explaining it, but at that point, I found a translucent green fry in my French fries, so I went to show my dad. However, he wasn't impressed, since he wasn't standing at the right angle to see that it was translucent.

Then I woke up.

Panel border from xkcd #505 "A Bunch of Rocks".

Garfield from Garfield 2013-01-17, 2015-12-02, and 2006-11-06.

Jon from Garfield 1999-06-26.

Two Skull assembled from the official art for Guts Tank and Doc Robot, via Mega Man Knowledge Base.