#Prodeus void reaper series#

Lovecraft worshiped Poe Dead Space and Dark Souls owe their inspiration to Resident Evil (1996) and Blood (1997). These texts were, in and of themselves, replicas of older horrors. These monsters include those from movies, but also horror videogames. There are palimpsests, and more palimpsests. Lumpy's work animates drawings of the titular cat, made and submitted daily on Reddit (the artists inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing and other Gothic media). One, it's a nod to the Gameboy-era (1989-2003) it also warps Garfield (the familiar) into images of contemporary monsters (the alien). Lumpy Touch's 'Garfield Gameboy'd' (2019) is both textually 'aware' and 'frozen,' in a Gothic sense. All the while, they decay and rot, but in a frozen state. Per decade, they can assume unique forms that nevertheless remain 'aware' of past versions. The Grim Reaper, or the man-in-black-these intimations of death are hardly new. These beings are textually and technologically different than Garfield one is retro, and the other vintage, but the tremendous mystery they project is even older, still. Consider the black giants from Hyper Light Drifter (2016). The destroyer is nebulous like Gozer's chosen destructor, it can taken many forms, and not just Garfield. It swells to tremendous size, a dark titan betrayed by a smaller counterpart. There's something uncanny about this simulacrum, the copy of a fictional cat there is also something perennial, a return of older images-of the Gothic destroyer. Replicated by fans, Davis' sassy icon has been reproduced into an actual demon: one, as artwork two, as digital artwork, in this 'videogame' by Lumpy Touch. The lone and level sands stretch far away.”ĭuring the pipe strip analysis video, Barrymore calls Garfield 'the demon cat.' And now it seems this is more than a passing whim. It falls apart like a corpse, but, like a giant, is too big to rot: This notion is a tenuous proposition, elliptical and crumbling. These additions highlight what was already monstrous, but hidden, pre-inoculation (or, in Garfield's case, omitted by Davis) they do so by injecting the subject with the object: the monsters of folklore and media. Furthermore, Gothic pastiche has a way of directly introducing monstrous elements into the host. Whatever happens, the revenant is not the same thing it was, pre-operation. The question is, what remains or rather, what happens when the pieces you work with are dead symbols that start to move again? As things endure, they are inevitably torn apart and stitched back together. This is because the Gothic is modal, and occurs over time.

#Prodeus void reaper series#

To be Gothic, Garfield must be tied to the past, but the past as Gothic (this includes the 'past' as a series of perennial, replicated images, both uncanny and abject). Normally Garfield is blank, his mayhem sanitized. We are Jon, if Jon found himself at the end of Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).Īs sagely as John(!) Blyth Barrymore is, his angelic musings could scarce prepare us for what horrors lay in wait. The invasion is complete, its freakish culmination playing out before our eyes. Taking decades to evolve, it now sits, out in the open for all to see we stare in horror as Garfields everywhere turn into monsters. What started off as harmless parody has now been infected by a truly sinister copycat (malign replication is a quintessential Gothic trope). But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.' Like Brundle, Garfield is no more. Such innocence will soon be forgotten, eclipsed by what now is.Īs Seth Brundle once said, 'I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. Compared with the monstrous, the ordinary feels fake, like a spurious shell. By comparison, their sire feels almost hyper-normal-false, because fresh wendigos haunt the viewer's spoiled mind. Considered en masse, there seems to be no end to this freakish 'brood' and their chimeric mutations.

They are uncanny (familiar-alien) and abject (abhorrent). They copy the original and each other, but poorly. Instead, the others multiply like a virus. All stem from the Jim Davis original, but he is no longer in control.