Stripped Bare

I read this article in today's Times about Garfield Minus Garfield. Over the past few months, I've received a few of these strips in e-mails, but no one ever included a link, so this is the first I'd known about the site. I was amazed to read that not only is Garfield creator Jim Davis not angry about the alterations to his original strips but that they actually made him reconsider the work he's been creating for 30 years. Perhaps it's because you usually hear about these cases only when someone orders a 'cease and desist,' but it seems rare for a commercial artist to be that open-minded, especially when the product is as financially successful as Garfield is. 

I suppose if Davis felt differently and wanted to make a stink, Dan Walsh would be protected in the U.S. by the parody proviso in our copyright laws (Walsh is in Dublin, but I imagine there are U.K. protections, too). Of course, I'm in favor of copyrights and protecting artistic output: I may give permission to use my artistic output freely, but I expect to be asked first... and if anyone's making money on the deal, I'd like to get paid, too. I can't imagine anyone making so dramatic an alteration to one of my plays without asking, but if they did, would I be as open as Davis? I hope I would, assuming that the revisions worked as well as Walsh's—I'd be less cool if they sucked.

What complicates the issue for me is the fact that there are a lot of reasons people want to alter work, especially in the theater. In the 19th century, some producers changed Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House to give it a happy ending; we had the all-male productions of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? more recently; and high schools (and probably even some colleges) regularly excise curse words from scripts. Is the big distinction between these examples and what Walsh has done the motivations behind the alterations? I don't think so: having only Jon in the strip is not dissimilar to having only men in Virginia Woolf—both accent something (in the one case cute philosophy, in the other femininity) by it's absence. 

I have to say that after reading a few Garfield Minus Garfields, I found myself wanting to compare the original strips to the alterations (I didn't). That to me is a remarkable achievement since I don't imagine I've been even vaguely curious about Garfield in over 25 years...