Haibane.info

I’ve been proselytizing Garfield Minus Garfield for a while now, so I’ve seen them all. However the latest is I think a true masterpiece, in how the presence of Garfield was subtle to begin with, and how the omission truly changes the meaning of the strip in a profound way. It’s brilliant. I’m stealing it.

In related news, Garfield creator Jim Davis knows about G-G and actually approves. That’s just cool.

XKCD pays homage to the Drake Equation, with their characteristic style:

It should be noted though that the new term Bs is redundant with L. That’s really the only parameter for which there is essentially no way to formulate any reasonable estimate. When I learned about the Drake Equation in college, we basically came to see that the Drake Equation was uttterly dominated by the assumption for L, even if fl, fi, and fc were all assumed to be 1. It’s a sobering thought that time, not space, is our greatest barrier to finding someone else Out There.

forget about Spiderman & Wolverine or Batman & Superman, folks.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems as first glance:

If reculsive artist Bill Watterson has his way, it will soon become illegal to own copies of his beloved Calvin & Hobbes comic strips — and even Stupendous Man may be powerless to stop him.

Breaking a long period of seclusion in which he granted no interviews and issued virtually no public statements, Watterson, creator of the wildly popular and critically acclaimed “Calvin & Hobbes”, has announced that he is seeking the total destruction of all copies of the strip in any form.

ok, it is far-fetched, but it isn’t as far-fetched. It’s pretty far to fetch, admittedly. But it just isn’t as far to fetch for Watterson, whose pre-Calvin artwork established him as pretty far ahead in the fetching department.

via Brian, This is quite a find: an exhaustive collection of pre-Calvin and Hobbes artwork by Bill Watterson. Sources for these scanned pieces of art include his Ohio college yearbook, a political cartooning magazine he worked at, and even a brief stint at the Cincinnati Post. I’ve put some of my favorites below the fold, but the whole thing deserves a leisurely browse.

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drat. I got sucked in despite my best attempts over the past couple of years to stay out. Ah well, thank heaven for RSS feeds. (I blame Shamus for his Snarl reference the other day).

Today’s XKCD is for all the browncoats out there.

via Steven, a page that finally reveals the truth about Calvin and Hobbes:

Mr. Bun is the only real character. In case you’ve forgotten, Mr. Bun appears only once or twice in the entire run of the comic, as Susie Derkin’s stuffed rabbit. Unlike Hobbes, Mr. Bun shows no sign, within the comic, of ever being “real.” (”Mr. Bun seems comatose,” comments Hobbes, after attending a tea party with Susie and Mr. Bun.) Naturally, this is strong evidence that Mr. Bun is the only “real” character, and everything else is occurring in Mr. Bun’s imagination. If Mr. Bun doesn’t actively particpate in his expansive fantasy world, it’s only because he prefers to just sit back and admire his work.

I suspected as much all along.

I came across XKCD via Shamus and am hooked. I mean, this is just genius.

(click to enlarge. original here)

An enterprising soul transcribed the complete Calvin and Hobbes into a searchable database. And then ran a statistically improbable word analysis on it.