6128: An Irrational Fear
| An Irrational Fear |
 Made by: Linguanaut |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
The edit is explained in the author's notes.
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
I saw #5601 and immediately saw the opportunity to make a much, much stupider joke. For clarity: Jon is not venomous; he is experiencing the inane, irrational fear of having envenomed something (with associated guilt, to boot!) despite being unable to do so. I've had these sorts of fears myself, at times, and can relate to both Jon and Garfield in this version of the strip.
I mostly collage these strips together in MS Paint, using text from the existing speech bubbles - which brought my attention to something interesting. The letter "I" has two different forms in this strip, and several other strips that I looked though afterwards - one that's just a plain vertical line, used when it's part of a word, and another with serifs on its ends, which is used when it's the pronoun 'I'. That's a pretty cool visual shorthand!
I would call it 'a little bit of logographic information in English text', but English text actually contains quite a lot of logographic information. (Technically, all the alphabetic languages I'm aware of do - alphabets record letters, but people read words; these frequently sound quite different to what a strict letter-by-letter reading would produce, even in 'phonetic' spelling systems, as a single word can sound different when spoken in different contexts. But don't tell the other languages that. Languages are notoriously self-conscious about their orthography.)
Original Square Root of Minus Garfield strip: 2024-09-18.
Original strip: 2008-04-22.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
Jon {running in panic}: I bit something!
{Garfield looks bored}
Jon {even more panicked, now running in the other direction}: What if I'm venomous?
{Garfield looks up, now slightly annoyed}
Jon {very panicked, has changed direction again}: It could die!
{Garfield, too angry and perplexed for words, extends his hands out in a 'come on!' gesture, and has an angry squiggle-line above his head}
