Miho sees the tropes
Remix comics are to comics as
Gag Dubs and
Gag Subs are to film and animation.
From another perspective, as the
Stick Figure Comic and
Sprite Comic tropes show, being unable to draw is not an impediment to pushing your own brand of funny on the world. Thanks to the
Remix Comic, neither is the inability to come up with your own characters.
Remix comics can be as simple as taking a frame or frames from your favourite webcomic, blanking out the speech bubbles in MS Paint and overwriting them with new text. They can also be made from scans of printed comics.
Sometimes, alterations to the actual images can also be made. These can range from simple things like changing the expression on someone's face, to reordering frames or even inserting entire new characters, possibly from other media entirely.
Copyright issues may interfere with distribution of remixes. However, some webcomickers are experimenting with
Creative Commons
licenses that enable them to explicitly allow a specific level of reuse, such as non-commercial derivative works that give attribution to them. Of course, comic writers and artists can also remix their own creations.
Usually remixes are made by fans. They are also known as Strip Slaying, Rescripting or Fanmixing.
Examples
Comic Books
- This Something Awful article features a number of remixed comic book covers. On the Something Awful forums, it's known as "Ruining the Moment".
- These spoof Spider-Man strips by Jay Pinkerton were popular for a time.
- The Dysfunctional Family Circus may have been the ultimate Remix Comic, spawning a community that generated countless remixed captions for 500 Bil Keane Family Circus strips, until Keane's publisher, King Features Syndicate, told DFC webmaster Greg Galcik to stop. During its run, DFC developed a complete set of tropes and in-jokes all its own- most of them as offensive as possible.
- Christopher Bird is known for his Remixes, including the entire Civil War miniseries.
- At 4thletter!, Gavok applies this treatment to Jeph Loeb's work in the Ultimate Universe.
Manga
Newspaper Comics
- On the Dilbert website there is now a tool to automate this.
- Garfield has spawned a few different takes on the source material. One is to remove the thought bubbles and let Garfield's expression and body language, as well as Jon's aside glances, tell the story. Another, known as "Garfield Minus Garfield", is to remove ''Garfield'' as well, usually to make Jon seem a sad, lonely, delusional man. Yet another is to replace Garfield with a more realistic cat. Still another takes a database of unmodified Garfield panels and randomly generates strips from them on demand.
- Taking this in about as many directions as possible is Square Root of Minus Garfield.
- This troper laughed so hard he cried on seeing Jon walk by with a little girl's dress and wig—without Garfield, it was apparently for...his own purposes.
- There's also the Garfield Randomizer, which takes random panels from a vast library of Garfield comic strips and puts three of them together to form strips that are, as the theory goes, funnier than the originals. There's been copyright trouble over this one, as predicted, but those resourceful enough to look for it can probably find it.
Other
- Several Jack Chick scripts have had this done to them. eg [1]
- The mini-comic that came with the first wave of Transformers Armada toys has become a milestone in Memetic Mutation history thanks to TF fan Matt Marshall (aka Blueshift/Yartek/Mr. Turtlewind). Originally stuffed with the same (highly edited) dialogue in three languages, the speech bubbles now tell the story of the mentally-impaired but well-meaning Autobot Hot Shot's quest for something known only as '''JaAm''. The resulting phenomenon has inspired fanart, kitbashes, and even gone so far as to be referenced on the packaging for a new Hot Shot toy, which also has the numberplate 'JAAM'.
Webcomics
- Megatokyo is possibly the place to go for rescripts. Fans have been at it since 2004 and may have improved over time. Their monthly rescript challenge started spontaneously when someone threw down the gauntlet to rescript using only Shakespeare. Since then, the theme changes each month. Recent examples have included bloopers, famous movie lines and ... umm... tvtropes.
- Over 200 remixes (counting image macros, but not forum avatars) were made from the webcomic Erfworld. Thanks to a Creative Commons license, they can be legally shared without having to ask for permission in advance; most can be found in two threads on the official forums
- The creators of No Need For Bushido have separate official sections on their website for fanmixes made by other people and non-canon remixes made by themselves.
- Dinosaur Comics is entirely based on this concept. The first strip was a Cut And Paste Comic of clip-art, but almost every one after that has been a remix of the first, with only the dialogue changed. (See also... the Dinosaur Comics page.)
- The fan forum for College Roomies From Hell has a running 'Perviverse' thread in which the fans (and in some case, the original author) post 'rescripts' in which the dialog has been replaced with rather unsubtle innuendo[2]. This eventually spawned a thread of clean rescripts in reply[3].
- ''POKETTO MONSUTAA SPECIAL SUPER EX ADVENTURE XXXVX THE CHRONICLES OF RED BLUE GREEN AND A BUNCH OF OTHER KIDS WITH COLORS FOR NAMES is a remix comic using the Pokémon Special manga. This one tends to edit the art to a degree as well.
- The El Goonish Shive forum also has one of these: the Strip Slaying thread (the old forum's thread can be found here). A certain panel of Justin became especially popular to the point of it being an in thread meme. A gif containing a number of the Justin images can be found here.◊
- Erfworld updates more frequently than that GIF does.
- Like EGS, "strip slays" of Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire are quite popular among the comic's "fans".
- A particularly infamous image board has instituted something called the CAD rule for "improving" the webcomic Ctrl Alt Del. In its most common incarnation, you remove the middle two panels and put the first and last in sequence, and then remove the dialogue from the last. Good luck with this one, guys...
- A large repository can be found on Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is not safe for work and probably not safe for people with marginally weak stomachs, too.
- The same image board also likes to play with Sonic comics, and a single panel from another unidentified comic; in the latter case, the original dialogue was probably "This is a sandwich."
- That panel is from a Jack Chick tract. Something Awful started it.
- DM Of The Rings and Darths And Droids both follow this concept... working with screencaps of the LoTR and Star Wars films and adding their own dialogue.
- The Bob And George forum has a custom comic thread that's over 250 pages long as of this writing, with its own in-jokes.
- Looking For Group fans have been rescripting more and more when producing motivators.
- Irregular Webcomic has recently invited people to do remixes.
- Brawl In The Family has a large "mashup" thread on the forums.
- On the Freefall forum the practice is known as "filking" (allegedly because a comic remix is like a filksong in the sense that new words are added to existing music/graphics.
- Early in '04, a particularly active filker looking for a bigger challenge invented the klif, a reverse filk that not only did all the strips from the beginning in chronological order but flipped each strip left/right. Strange as it may sound, the experiment continued with some intervals for a whole three years, eventually doing all (some 900) strips that had been released before the thread started.
- These occasionally appear on the Gunnerkrigg Court forums, often adding Boxbot The Terrible to an existing scene.
- In The KAMics the author himself did this with some of his comics under the title Remix Theatre.
