Garkov is a comic strip generator that uses Markov chains to synthesize new Garfield strips based on transcripts of several hundred existing strips. The output varies nicely from plausible to surreal to downright incoherent.
The output is a probabilistic remix of original Garfield dialogue, divorced of its original context and plopped into blanked-out speech bubbles in (currently a bit less than a dozen of) Davis' original 3-panel daily strips.
The generation work is being done in Perl, and the final images are rendered using CSS positioning and a hand-cut garfield comic <img> font. Unfortunately, that means the raw images can't be saved as such, but screenshotting is totally kosher and the site allows users to save strips they particularly like to permalinks, as well.
This is really a proof-of-concept -- nothing in the code is Garfield-specific, so adapting the codebase to other comics is in principle totally doable. But I needed to start with something, and Garfield was that something, and so: Garkov.
It's also almost certainly buggy, and yes, there are some weird yet-to-be-fixed typos in the transcripts.
posted by rtha at 8:47 AM on June 6, 2008