THE ART OF RETOONING

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In the beginning, Good Rubbish was intended to be nothing more than an online showroom for my repurposing and art-like projects, but that narrow field of content was destined for a hasty demise. Soon I started crafting hideous t-shirt designs, then relaying anecdotes from what remains of my personal life, before bottoming out with my first ever "look at these here funny picchers I done took" post (though that entry was actually 2+ years in the making, so I doubt it'll ever be duplicated).

Well my friends, it's a new morning in the world of Good Rubbish (there are some who call it Grubbishiapolis, but I choose not to associate with those people due to the fact that their sense of humor is horrible), and as such it's time to unveil a new subset of somewhat-consumable crap (hopefully this will be the last time I do such a thing... I'd hate to imagine what would happen to this poor site if I started spewing political commentary and sports talk).

This new and delicious subset falls under the heading of "retooning", an admittedly unoriginal concept that was first introduced to me by my good friend Seamus O'Tilliger (RIP) in 1998 following a high school after-prom celebration. All it involves is using a normal pencil eraser to remove the captions from newspaper comic strips, then writing in new captions that (unlike the original captions) are actually funny. As Shipp said to me on that fateful night, "come on man, Rex Morgan MD is just a couple letters away from being Sex Organ MD... it's pure comic gold."

I hadn't slept in about 28 hours when he told me this, but I really doubt that my resulting dementia had any effect on my interpretation of the situation... his logic was irrefutably sound: that was comic gold. I've retooned comics from time to time ever since, though hopefully doing it for this blog will bring my caption creating prowess to new, previously unforseen heights (I think you'll agree after reading this post that I couldn't get any worse at it, so I've got that going for me).

Anyway, you may be wondering to yourself why someone would want to do this to newspaper comics... actually, I sincerely doubt that anyone could be so mentally deficient as to wonder about something like that, but it's not a difficult question to answer just the same: Almost every single comic strip that's regularly printed in legitimate newspapers across the United States (and the Onion does not qualify as a legitimate newspaper, though it's at least as good of a news source as the Fox News network) is incredibly unfunny.

Family Circus blows, Dennis the Menace is dreadful, Rhymes With Orange? More like Rhymes With Fucking Sucks. Barring only Bizarro, F-Minus, and the occasional Doonesbury cartoon, newspaper comics unilaterally eat caribou penis. It's an undeniable fact. Thusly, if they are going to make anyone laugh (which of course is a comic's intended purpose), they need to be altered. When you think about it, by retooning you're doing the comics a huge favor.

(by the way, if you're interested in reading a truly insightful commentary on the merits of the comic strip "Garfield", I'd highly recommend this article by internet mogul Maddox, Chairman and CEO of the Best Page in the Universe).

I think we've all had enough of my blathering by now, so let me show you what this fantastic art form can do:



Alright... I really shouldn't have chosen this one as an example, because now that I look at it again this comic is actually kind of funny. Bad mustache day... I like that. Well, I retooned it anyway, which produced this:



Get it? See, cause he was all upset about his mustache, but then his wife asked him what was wrong and he was all like 'your face, you filthy tramp'. Get it??? He hates his wife, and he's really fucking old!! HAHAHA!!

Crap, that was awful. I really shouldn't have led into this retooning concept with that particular comic... the first guy's line was definitely way funnier than mine. Mother of God that's a depressing revelation... hopefully this next comic will bring redemption to the McHanslaw Manor:



Alright, this one's a TEXTBOOK example of your modern comic strip... it's crap like this that makes me wish my Sunday comics came with a complimentary foghorn. Horrible.

Here's the basic formula: Unfunny action + unfunny comment = nationwide syndication. Well done Bound and Gagged, your continued success speaks poorly upon the American publics taste in bathroom reading material.

For this retooning, I used a classic approach in which the new caption has almost no relevance to the image it's attached to, but somehow it all works out... or maybe it doesn't work out at all. Yeah, this one really didn't work either, but I like it.



If you can't read what that says, don't bother asking. It's really not worth your time, I promise you.

Well now, this has been a fabulous waste of time, now hasn't it? I hope you've enjoyed your first journey into the world of retooning, though that seems incredibly unlikely. Regardless, I doubt that I'll do these all that often as they require me to use a scanner, which for whatever reason I find to be an incredibly archaic tool (sort of like the fax machine, whenever I have to use either of those I feel like I'm about to drop a deuce in a chamber pot before tying my goodwife to a wooden pole because she oversalted my turkey dinner). This won't be the last time you'll hear from retooning on Good Rubbish though, I can assure you of that... so, you know, if you're going to stop reading this blog anytime soon, now would probably be a good time to do it.

Regards,

Enron