Somebody at Stealthunit posted a thing called the Garfield Randomizer. Here’s a short explanation as to what it is:
..so this guy noticed that Garfield comics make just as much sense if you throw random panels together, and sometimes are actually pretty funny. He got a cease and desist letter. So he made the code available for people who wanted to try it for themselves. Here we go!
It’s addictive and a lot of fun. For example, here’s one that I cooked up in just a few minutes:
Not that good, but it shows the potential of this thing. Garfield comics ARE surprisingly modular, and it doesn’t take long to cook up a funny and sensible strip.
So what has this got to do with crowdsourcing? For one, the Garfield Randomizer is a great and fun tool for people to play with and express themselves. It’s incredibly viral. Hell, I’ve sent the link to a number of friends already and together we made a bunch of pretty darn funny comics (some of which were raunchy, I’ll freely admit). If I were Garfield’s publisher, instead of sending a cease and desist letter I would take the Garfield Randomizer right away and put it up somewhere and have people create their own comics – and share them! Imagine, a voting and commenting system for the best strips which could eventually be gathered into a book which people could buy. And the thing is, if the publisher were in control of this randomizer, they could offer links to the original strips from which the individual tiles were taken, and from there offer people the opportunity to order the original comic book on Amazon, for example. And let’s be honest, if they take this one down it’ll pop up again somewhere anyway, so might as well join the fun and get some additional benefits from it.
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