Dear Internet,

I just received word that the international supply of ellipses is running dangerously low. Please conserve.

Your friend in punctuation,

John D. Moore

Labels: comic

When it's daylight savings time, within a week of the summer solstice, and you're leaving work after dark, you've probably spent too much time at work. Sure enough, I spent about twelve hours at work yesterday, struggling with a backlog and an ever-increasing daily workload. And when I stepped out of my office building, I knew that if I went home right away, my apartment would be bereft of food. And my stomach growled; the measly sandwich I'd had some eons ago had proved insufficient sustenance.

And I knew that among the breads and fruits and other such foodstuffs I'd buy, I'd be leaving my local Smith's Marketplace with a package of gummi bears without any regard to brand or quality. It's called a craving. And a craving supported by hunger is a might force indeed.

A little after ten o'clock, I stumbled into my apartment, stashed my frozen goods in the freezer, and tore into my Smith's house brand (Kroger) bag of gummi bears. I was absolutely predisposed to an enjoyment of these rubbery, ursine candies. However, I don't know if I've ever had better gummi candies. Fresher, richer, and all-around better than any gummi bears in memory, I was so impressed, I continued to eat, and eat, and eat them, foregoing dinner proper for far too long. Vaguely fruity, heavenly goodness sustained me.

They were the best bears I could have hoped for at the time I needed them most. Or were they? Water when you're parched can taste like the best vintage wine. No matter. These gummi bears were, quite simply the greatest consumables ever sealed in a plastic pouch.

Five somethings out of five somethings.

These days, I try not to let myself get too carried away with film hype. But these are the Coen brothers, who have yet to do any wrong, and this minute-long international teaser for Burn After Reading is already one of the best things I've seen in 2008.

Labels: babbling about films

My personal history with Jim Davis's Garfield is long, starts out passionate, and ends apathetic. Five years older than me (and turning 30 this very day), it's the first comic strip I can remember from my childhood. The actual date of the strip eludes me, but what sticks in my mind is one Sunday strip about a grotesquely fat woman at a laundromat being obnoxious, and a weekday about Garfield terrorizing a grotesquely fat kid. As I grew older, I became rather obsessed with Garfield's routine antics, devising a way to purchase all of the collection books (in black and white, thank you very much), and honing my ability to replicate Davis's trademark bug eyes in the Garfield fanart that adorned the margins of my math homework. I even found Garfield and Friends one of the highlights of my weekend and celebrated its decidedly lesser new theme song introduced in the Fall of 1994. Seriously, the thing's pretty much unwatchable.

So I became disenchanted with Garfield. The strips themselves seemed to flatten out and get lazier, too, as the years wore on and I stopped paying much attention to the funny pages. Nearly the entire supporting cast was dropped, and the only narrative arcs were those weeks where Garfield would watch TV all week.

But a few years ago, something magical happened. Garfield, more oversaturated than overweight, reached a critical mass of bitterness and disappointment as a bunch of twenty-something hipsters like myself found that what we once enjoyed just wasn't so much. Were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and their ilk still as readily available as they were after school in the nineties, there'd be a lot less nostalgia and the cultural tee-shirt landscape would look a lot different than it does. So the tide of opinion on the Internet turned against America's first fat cat. And the Garfcore movement was born.

As far as I know, it started with the Garfield Randomizer, which assembled panels from Garfield comics in a--you guessed it!--random order, creating an offbeat juxtaposition of Garfield's formulaic cadences that the Internet reacted to with much rejoicing and refreshing. I could quote half the Internet at the time as saying "It makes Garfield funny!" And thus was born a new art form: making Garfield funnier.

A bunch of websites cropped up that did this, but a forum topic at Truth and Beauty Bombs seemed to really set off the trend of removing Garfield's thought bubbles, leaving us with only the now borderline schizoid ramblings of Jon Arbuckle. They were funny. Some of the best recontextualized the jokes, while others saved bad, tired puns and redundant dialogue-based jokes from themselves in digging up the decent underlying sight gag. The Comic Strip Doctor and Eric at Websnark wrote some good articles about this in 2006. Recently, Jon's been rendered completely schizoid and almost inhumanly pathetic by Garfield Minus Garfield.

But what really sold me on Garfield-as-art-project was Chris Stangl's marvelous analytical work at Garfield: Permanent Monday, which launched with the brilliant tagline, "A Week of Garfield. Every Week. Until We Die." Taking a cue from the magnificent Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke and the inimitable Josh Fruhlinger's The Comics Curmudgeon, Stangl embarked on a noble quest to get to the heart of Garfield's themes of quotidian rigor and emotional barriers, illuminated not just by his description of the text but by his observation of Garfield's economy of line and its limited visual motifs. While largely tongue-in-cheek, Stangl never reduced his work to snark and actually presented a frequently compelling argument. Though the author disappeared in October of 2006, only to reappear in January of 2008 with three commentaries, his reading of the strip has influenced the way I read it. With those tools and that palette to draw from, I've actually found myself enjoying Garfield again in recent years.

And then there's Fatal Farm, who brought us the inspired Lasagna Cat: Tributes to Jim Davis. Sitcom-style reenactments of various choice strips, followed by excellently-produced music videos. Thus far, this is the pinnacle of Garfcore. Witness my favorite installment in the series, a strip from April 20th, 2007.



We've entered a strange new world in our pop culture, and Garfcore is a shining example of the strange dialogue we're having with it.

What's new is new, and what's old is new if you missed it when it was new. Over the past couple of months, the following works have been keeping me busy, and I can't recommend them enough.

1. The Sopranos

Nine years late to the party, but I finally made it. I can't tell you what it is exactly that kept me from checking out the show widely considered the most shining example of the television medium done right. Was it the media oversaturation manifest in grating The Simpsons parodies slapped on every slappable product? I don't know. But the eighty-six hours of The Sopranos would probably be the most purely rewarding eighty-six hours of anything I've ever taken in. Anchored by two positively powerhouse players, James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, giving the performances of a generation, and keenly, shrewdly, darkly led by the clearly genius mind of David Chase, I have no doubt The Sopranos will be remembered as one of the most valuable cultural artifacts of our most recent turn of the century. Grim, personal, broad, angry, cynical, sardonic, and depressed, it belongs just a little above David Simon's The Wire when it comes to listing television's greatest works. After finishing the series, the Netflix disc hung around my DVD player for a couple weeks, as I just wasn't willing to give it up.

2. killer7

I'm pretty sure Suda51 and his team over at Grasshopper Manufacture broke the central rule of game design when they concocted killer7: gameplay comes first. But for this video game player, the primary focus on story, character, and aesthetic was a refreshing experience. And the gameplay isn't bad in the slightest, and nowhere near as demented as the game's plot, which introduced me to just about the most disturbing "hobby" I could ever discover the old man next door was into. Also, there's a scene where MASK de Smith, the wrestler character, headbutts a bullet. There's enough twists and turns in the relatively short game to signal to me that I'll be replaying this one for many happy years to come.

3. The Fall

Tarsem Singh's art-about-art masterpiece, The Fall might have opened near you to negative reviews and little to no fanfare. It's a shame, really, because my second viewing only enriched what was already a lovely experience. Don't let its premise (or the fact that Tarsem directed The Cell) put you off. Not a vanity project itself, the film examines the motivations and responsibilities entwined with an artist's reasons for creation, and in doing so examines our motivations and responsibilities in living. If you can see it, you need to.

4. The World Ends With You

Yes, I finally succumbed to what's been calling my name on store aisles for the better part of four years now, and purchased a Nintendo DS. And on that DS, I discovered this recent, marvelous gem of an action RPG. Striking in its visual and audio design, addictive and exhaustively customizable in its gameplay, and moving in its story, it's fast joined the ranks of my all-time favorite games.

5. Kaiba

From Masaaki Yuasa, mad genius behind the profoundly human film Mind Game and bonkers horror-romance series Kemonozume, comes Kaiba, a 12-episode anime series still airing in Japan. See that picture above? Our protagonist, Kaiba, is on the right. Yes, he has a hole in his chest. In his world, memories of individuals are stored on chips that can be transferred from body to body, and the underclasses sometimes sell the bodies of loved ones to the decadent rich in order to survive. Until it gets licensed in the States (which it probably never will), it's streaming at crunchyroll.com. Thus far, episode 7 has been uploaded and subtitled. Episode 3 broke my heart. Then my heart mended. Then I rewatched episode 3 and got my heart broken all over again.