Fantastic site, I’m now subscribed!

Travors here, aka Dan Walsh, the guy responsible for garfieldminusgarfield.net
Here to answer some of your questions!

I’ll be receiving a small fee for writing the foreword. When it’s translated to euro I think it comes out at about €12.34 (ok that bit’s a joke)
But that’s it. Nothing more. Frankly, it’s a miracle they’re even involving me. The could have shut my whole site down in the blink of a lawyers eye. But Jim Davis is a guy with a great sense of humour and a gifted business mind.

***they’re taking the original strips that they already have and doing the same thing that Walsh did***

That’s correct. They’ll be copying some that I made on the site and altering their original print quality versions.

There’s also more but I’m not sure if I can’t talk about it yet ;-)

Having said that, I don’t think getting paid for “altering someone else’s work” would be such an unusual (or even wrong) thing. Plenty of musicians are paid for sampling other peoples music. And doesn’t nearly every movie of a Shakespeare play alter the original manuscript? Albeit probably with permission first!

If you’d like to ask me any questions about the book or G-G feel free to get in touch.

Regards,
Dan

Probably not as much as Dan Didio.

ba-dum.

That reminds me of “Rapture Riders” a mash-up that mixed The Doors with Blondie… and became the “new” single used to promote a new greatest hits collection for Blondie?

IANAL, so take this with a pinch of salt: I imagine they can’t say “collecting” because the webcomic wasn’t officially authorised. Following on from that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the book is all-new with strips that haven’t appeared on the website, so that there’s a clear distinction between the authorised and unauthorised strips. Time will tell

Let’s say a DJ comes up with a radically re-mixed version of a song that was a hit 20 years ago. He puts it up on the web and anyone can listen to it streamed from that site. The songwriter and/or original artist and/or copyright holder comes along and markets it through itunes and makes a fortune… Shouldn’t the DJ get even a small piece?

For the book format, I think a more effective presentation would be the “minus garfield” version and the original on the next (not facing) page. The lack of context is what makes so many of the GMG versions hilarious, or at least satisfyingly strange. I think the original versions right there where the eye can pick up the context without meaning to before the reader has a chance to enjoy the weirdness of the GMG version will suck a lot of the enjoyment out of it.

2) I’ll bet he’s getting paid for writing the introduction. Beyond that I’ll bet he’s getting paid what Jim Davis feels is appropriate for coming up with the idea. None of this would happen without Davis’s blessing after all.

With this announcement I finally understand why the website has been allowed to exist for as long as it has – Davis likes it. I wondered why no one had shut it down yet.

Well, Jim Davis hasn’t drawn Garfield in over a decade and he’s getting serious scratch. I think it takes more work to remove Garfield from the panels compared to what Davis does. Therefore, I think the situation results in a substantial payday. For Jim Davis, of course.