Remix Comic

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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 of Remix Comic include:

Anime and Manga

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".
  • Christopher Bird is known for his Remixes, including the entire Marvel Civil War miniseries.
  • At 4thletter!, Gavok applies this treatment to Jeph Loeb's work in the Ultimate Universe.
  • Siege Reloaded is a remix of Marvel's event comic Siege that has a great deal of fun with just how stupid the idea of invading Asgard really is.
  • Jet Dream is a remix of various comics from the late '60s and early '70s, particularly the actual feature by the same name that appeared as a backup in the The Man from U.N.C.L.E. comic book. Teen humor and romance comics are also remixed in the titles It's Cookie! and My Jet Dream Romance. Presented as a Retraux comic book line whose publisher was obsessed with sex-changes and who in "real life" supported a "Fem Is In!" movement aimed at encouraging all boys to become wholesome heterosexual crossdressers.
  • Dale: The Arousing Adventures of Dale Manx, Trans-Fem P.I. uses source material from Marvel Comics' Dazzler to tell the tale of Dale Manx, formerly a male dick with a girl's name, now just a girl with a girl's name. Retraux '80s fun for all.
  • Truer Than True Romance brilliantly lampoons the romance comics of the 1940s and 1950s by keeping the original panels and rewriting all the speech bubbles.
  • Oddity Collector did a remix of the final pages of Batman #644 in 2005, years before DC Comics did their own Author's Saving Throw for that controversial issue.
  • Apropos Comics featured humorous remixes of various comic book sequences. While many were one-shot gags, there were also recurring characters like Bat-Botanist ("Sworn to avenge his parents' deaths while teaching the citizens of Gotham about botany") and Captain American Government (Captain America (comics), but with more of a focus on lecturing his opponents about the legislative process and the Electoral College.)
  • What Were They Thinking? was a 2006 series, actually published as a comic book by Boom Studios, which gave humorous recaptions to public domain comic book material from the '40s and '50s.
  • There are actually a few examples of Remix Comics (done "seriously" and not for purposes of parody) from major comic book publishers:
    • Circa 1969, DC Comics figured there was room for yet another knockoff of Archie on the stands... but instead of creating a new series, they took old stories from their Dobie Gillis licensed comic, redrew the main character likenesses and relettered the scripts to produce the "new" series Windy and Willy.
    • In the mid-'70s, Planet of the Apes suddenly became a hot property. Marvel Comics had a popular "Apes" series (in its black-and-white Marvel Magazines line). Marvel's British imprint, Marvel UK, eagerly followed suit with its own magazine, reprinting the American stories. But Marvel UK's "Apes" magazine was published weekly, so they quickly ran out of American material to reprint. How then to fill the space? Marvel UK just took stories from Marvel's War of the Worlds/Killraven feature (very loosely inspired by H.G. Wells' original and never printed in the UK), rewrote the scripts and altered the art to turn Killraven's alien adversaries into apes. The result? Killraven became Apeslayer, and Marvel UK could fill out the pages of its Planet of the Apes magazine for the rest of its run.

Newspaper Comics

  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • Mallard Fillmore With Funny [dead link] strips the political rhetoric of the original comic and replaces it with the word "dicks" repeated over and over again.
  • These remixes of the Amazing Spider-Man newspaper strip were done by Jay Pinkerton.
  • 3eanuts simply removes the last panel of Peanuts strips. This tends to make them extremely depressing.

Web Comics

Western Animation

Other Media

  • Several Jack Chick scripts have had this done to them. For example, darquedungeon.
  • 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 gone so far as to be referenced on the packaging for a new Hot Shot toy, which also has the numberplate 'JAAM'.