When Garfield leaves the scene

There are plenty of people who hate a particular comic strip.

I was no fan of “Cathy,” for example, and I’d personally like to strangle the creator of the hideously sweet “Family Circus,”
but he’s dead now.

But some people take their displeasure with a comic strip to the next level. They take original comic strip and massage it just a bit — and in many cases make it quite a bit better.

Today I was reminded of the likes of “Garfield minus Garfield,” wherein a plucky blogger grabs “Garfield” comic strips and digitally removes the cartoon cat from all the frames.

The result?

Jon, Garfield’s owner, becomes a slightly schizophrenic whackjob who babbles to himself through his dull and sad life.

Here are a few samples:

Yet another site (which probably gave birth to “Garfield Minus Garfield”) shows what “Garfield” would be like if we the readers — and Jon — weren’t privy to the fat cat’s inner thoughts.

Again, Jon comes out seeming to be a little off his rocker:
 

Of course, Garfield isn’t the only target of such tinkering. “Marmaduke Explained” takes rather malicious shots at the one-panel comic strip featuring the orange Great Dane.

In the blog, the author offers a deadpan description of how each cartoon shows what a gigantic jerk of a dog Marmaduke is.

Take a look at this panel:
 

The alleged humor is then described by blogger Joe Mathlete: “Marmaduke destroyed his owner-family’s mailbox (and probably a number of other things) during his afternoon walk with his owner-man. Owner-Man makes light of the mailbox situation to his wife, yet another example of how the bulk of their communication is a numb, disconnected and empty series of weak jokes and ironic understatements deployed in order to distance themselves from the horror and futility of spending their lives as the prisoner-slaves of their powerful, self-serving ogre of a dog.”

Likewise, Bil Keane, the artist of the afformentioned “Family Circus,” has had his creation targeted by jokesters.

Over at Amazon, his books are often  “reader-reviewed” with the intent to make Keane seem evil.
“Bil Keane is an insensitive megalomaniac. The children in ‘A family circus’  … suffer some other sort of terrible mental affliction. And yet this “man” mocks their shortcomings. There is a special place in hell for Bil Keane.” says one review.

However, when Amazon spots such reviews, they delete them, so don’t expect it to be there for too long.

So what comic strips do you hate? Which ones don’t you get?
  And no, you can’t nominate “The Downward Spirals.”