From maggiethecartoonist:
Suggested by a reader who is fond of both Mutts and meta-comic jokes:
Thanks to Maggiethecartoonist for this GibbleGuts:
And Maggiethecartoonist also provides these two more Garfield entries — with brief comments for each!
“Farms must be fun.”
‘I cleaned out all the comic folders, and my computer still looks like a meatball!’
Comics I Don't Understand 
Re: Garfield (1 of 3): I can accept that Garfield’s (and Jon’s) eyes are bigger than their stomachs, and I understand the logistics about why his legs were redesigned, but Liz looked a whole lot more like a normal human being before she started freebasing Botox:
P.S. Ooops, sorry: the second strip was supposed to be this one:
P.P.S. Re: Garfield (2 of 3) – Whenever we resort to making a gravy or sauce from one of those pre-packaged envelope mixes (usually from “Knorr” or “Maggi”), I tend to refer to the result as “Cream of Brown“.
P.P.P.S. Re: Garfield (3 of 3) – I think the title panel was supposed to be an attempt at one of those old 3D “anaglyph” images, but the color-based 3D glasses that I have† do not have the correct tints, so the effect doesn’t work right.
P.P.P.P.S. † – Included for an extra on the DVD release of “Monsters vs. Aliens”.
That title panel wouldn’t work as an anaglyph. You’d still see a double image in each eye because of the black lines between the blue and red, and the distance between the blue and red doesn’t change from his back hand to his front, so there’d be no actual depth to the image.
I hope I haven’t been sending in too many cartoons!
Also, the Gibbleguts website (Thanks Phil) usually has good cartoons, although some register on the eew scale.
@powers-The comments on the GoComics indicate that it could work if you had the correct kind of 3d glasses. I never knew there were different kinds.
@ Maggie – Powers is (mostly) right. All 3D glasses (no matter which system†) work in basically the same way: the lenses for the left and right eye filter the image on the page (or screen) into two separate images for each eye, so that the brain can resolve the 3D appearance. The problem with the Garfield panel is that it presents three images, but nobody has three eyes. Unlike Powers, I do think the relative positions of the colored lines are variable, but the intended result is non-intuitive: the artist(s) were trying to force Garfield’s head into the forground, and not his left paw.
What they should have done is just print the red and blue lines, and remove the black entirely, or (at most) use the black only for the portions where the color lines actually intersect. In either case, the result would probably have been too “muddy” for anyone (meaning everyone) who didn’t own the correctly colored glasses†, because the accuracy of newspaper color printing is anything but perfect.
P.S. † The simplest 3D glasses use two colors to mask a two-color image, and can only be used for “monochrome” material. For the Garfield panel, the glasses should be magenta and cyan; old classic movies tended to use red and green. Modern 3D theaters have more sophisticated (polarized) lenses (for the glasses and on the projectors), which permits color images, but that requires viewers to hold their heads straight. There’s a very sophisticated system that uses synchronized LCD shutters on the lenses (so that they can be used even at a slant), but those (powered) “glasses” are uncomfortable (heavy), not to mention a very expensive investment for theaters.
P.P.S. @ Maggie – Nobody around here is ever going to complain about anybody keeping the CIDU queue well-supplied with good comics, but if you are worried about it, you can always ask the Editors to make your submissions anonymous.
I rather luv the “Magic Eye” pictures, which do not require viewers but do expect the person to separate the images by changing the overlap of a repeating(-with-variation) pattern. You do this by crossing, or more commonly uncrossing your eyes. Getting that fusion wrong will reverse the Z-axis of the 3D image (that is, toward or away from you), for either an amusing somewhat different look, or a really incomprehensible structure.
Four birds, flying at different distances, all headed mostly towards the viewer. Background of trees has a couple discernible layers, and sky is further back. From http://www.eyetricks.com/3dstereo147.htm
Beautiful!
Very slightly flawed technically, as the two further-away birds have inexplicable patches of tree-color on their bodies or wings.
Yes but. You could ask on the other hand how come all of the birds are colored as foliage-green! (And they’re not tropical parrots…)
Alright, that makes sense. I wonder if it was supposed to look like it was 3d, and nothing more?
No, I don’t mind being mentioned. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t flooding them with cartoons!
And here was an older-tech approach to 3D viewing!
I don’t understand the Batman + Grim Reaper.
I remember those!
I guess the Garfield “Gladys” strip underscores why one shouldn’t get too chummy with their livestock.
I’m glad I’m not the only one here intrigued by the faux-3D effect in the Garfield strip. Along with you I grabbed the anaglyph glasses I keep by the computer. I’m not shocked there was no image depth to find. It’s just a pop-cultural reference here.
For several years I belonged to a stereo 3D photography club. Unfortunately, whenever I’ve tried to share my stereo pictures in real life with friends or online I have generally been met with disinterest.
FWIW, here’s how an anaglyph comic can work. Unfortunately for me I had to give up trying to read the dialog. It’s just not sharp enough for me. Perhaps you’ll have better luck. The composition and depth effect of the comic panels is pretty good, however.
https://comicbookcatacombs.blogspot.com/2011/04/anaglyph-theatre-presents-wizard-of.html?m=1
Never name the edible livestock.
I don’t understand the Batman + Grim Reaper.
Batman + Death == Vampire. Because vampires turn into bats. And they’re dead, or undead.
I think if you get out measuring tools you’ll find that the distance between red and blue lines is consistent. The only difference is in the thickness of the lines, which makes the whitespace shrink for Garfield’s left hand. That doesn’t mean the lines are closer together.
@ Powers – Mea culpa! I discovered my mistake yesterday morning, but Pentecost is a long holiday weekend in Germany, and between guests and other activities I wasn’t able to get away to my desktop machine to describe what had happened until now. My problem was not the variable width of the thick lines, but rather that I had reversed and mis-identified the pairings of the thin lines between his teeth. Zooming the image to cover most of my monitor, and then measuring the distances with a (transparent) plastic ruler produced a uniform (horizontal) separation of 12mm between the corresponding edges of all the red and blue lines (independent of position), with the black lines centered 6mm away from either one. This is (of course) much more believable in terms of what normal cartoonists would actually be able to draw: Davis’s squad of assistants simply inked one (black) image, and then they copied it in red and blue to the left and right, respectively.
P.S. @ Maggie – As Powers (correctly) said @4, the tripartite image will never work as 3D, no matter what the folks at GC might think, and as Grawlix noted, “…it’s just a pop-cultural reference“, nothing more.
P.P.S. The “Eyetricks” website in Mitch’s link depends in part on ancient (not necessarily secure) technology, such as the former “Windows Media Player” and “Shockwave Flash”, both of which have been superceded by more modern (presumably safer) systems. The website is conspicuously anonymous, and offers disreputable ads for cheating on homework, so I would like to recommend “caveat visitor!“
Well fine, ignore the link and enjoy the images. My purpose with the “link” (URL written out) was to credit the source of the image I was copying, not to send people there. (And yes, it is very clunky and odd to use. )
I’m glad a couple readers were able to visualize and enjoy the Birds stereogram!
@ Mitch – No, that’s not what I meant, I only said “be careful”. Many of the 3D images in the menu are very interesting, although I did run into a series of them that I had trouble resolving (I kept getting that “negative Z axis” effect you mentioned above). I only got suspicious when I tried some of the other items in the menu, and ended up with a page that displayed no image. The page’s source code revealed it was encoded with Shockwave Flash, but I use a browser that does not support that (for data security reasons).
P.S. The most interesting 3D effect I ever saw wasn’t an intentional image: it was simply a wall that had been covered with round ceramic tiles in a hexagonal array. The tiles were off-white, with a diameter of about ¾inch (or 2cm), with light gray grout filling in the gaps between them. Looking at the wall, my eyes accidentally misaligned in just the same way as for the “Magic Eye” 3D pictures, and the wall suddenly acquired an indeterminate (variable) depth, as if the tiles were floating in air. It was so surprising that I got dizzy and grabbed the wall to balance myself, which instantly resolved it back to a flat wall. I then experimented with the effect, discovering that it varied depending on the orientation of my head, and the “registration” of my eyes (how many tiles I was “skipping” to bring two of them together). I wish I could remember where I saw it: I pretty sure it was in a movie theater (in Berlin), but I don’t remember which one.
Yeah, I’ve experienced that effect in non-planned settings for a long time — I first noticed it when I was in 9th grade and waiting in line along with a class, alongside an ordinary chain-link fence on the school grounds. Somehow my eyes ended up fusing the diamond pattern a step or two off from each other, and it seemed the fence was very much closer to my face than it really was. Much like Kilby’s encounter with a wall, when I reached out to it, it sprung back into proper perspective. But this wasn’t a rare or irreproducible phenomenon — I get it all the time with spatial rhythmic patterns.
The first one evokes this:
Of course, even if the question is, “Name of your first pet”, you can use something different. The only advantage to the real answer is being able to remember it.
Yup. Just don’t turn into the Starbucks customers that can’t remember their “coffee name” and get upset when their real name isn’t called.
Mitch 4 – I don’t see any birds – just see the 2 different color assortments of the picture alternating (went to the site and only saw same there also). Then again, I don’t normally see the 3D effect when looking at regular 3D pictures with the glasses.
I still have my View Master (brown in color) from the late 1950s. Last time we bought reels for it was probably in the 1990s – as it was after we moved into our house. It was pictures from the Smithsonian Museums. The viewer and reels still sit in a basket under our “east end of the sofa” end table.
@ Meryl et al. – It takes a certain amount of practice to “see” the 3D effect in “Magic Eye” images; the effort required for first time viewers can be considerable, and not everyone can manage it. The books normally describe several different strategies to achieve the required “crossing” of the eyes; a method that works for one person may be useless for another.
P.S. It seems obvious that anyone who can generate a Magic Eye 3D image might use the process on a series of variable shapes, in order to produce a 3D film clip of an animated object. It turns out that it has been done, but nobody has done it well (yet). I was able to find a number of examples, but most of them were incredibly poor. Nobody seems to realize that the edges of the matrix should remain invariable, to facilitate “locking” onto the 3D effect. The only halfway decent example that I could find is an animated shark that has been copied onto many websites (without anyone ever having the decency to credit the source). Since the blinking GIF image is incredibly irritating (if you aren’t trying to see the 3D effect), I am not going to embed it here (use the link above).
The first one I saw was years ago, one someone brought into work. When just looking at it, the figure seemed just to be a featureless gray page. There were two dots for alignment. Once you learned the trick, there were a number of layers and figures that would come into view.
I was able to get the shark to work.
Thank you Kilby!