Remix Comic

We had nothing to do with this. We swear.

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.

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Examples (organized by the medium of the original material)

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 Civil War (2006) miniseries,(deservedly) ridiculing the storyline while heavily flanderizing some characters (Wolverine, for example, is only able to speak in combinations of the words "snikt" and "bub").
• 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.
  • Blind Monkey's followup, Injustice For All gives DC's Injustice: Gods Among Us tie-in comic the same treatment. Most notably, it turns Superman into an emotionally stunted manchild, Wonder Woman into a mixture of Kratos and The Devil, and Batman into a terrible best friend.
• 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, 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 The Many Loves of 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 Killraven feature (very loosely inspired by The War of the Worlds 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.
  • Marvel published four issues of a Dennis the Menace (US) knockoff, Peter the Little Pest, in 1969-1970. The stories were actually repurposed from a 1956-1957 series, Melvin the Monster. The "new" series gave Peter red hair (compared to Melvin's blond hair) and softer, less "menacing" expressions.
  • Editora Abril, the official publisher of Disney comics in Brazil from 1950 to 2018, has also adopted this practice for some time. In the early 1960s, José Carioca got his own comic book in Brazil, with new stories entirely made by the newly formed team of Brazilian Disney artists. Things went fine during the first few numbers, but, since the team was still small, it soon became clear they could not properly keep up with the demand of a bi-weekly comic book and needed a quicker, easier alternative for making more José Carioca stories. The (very unusual) solution for this problem was redrawing US-made comics that originally starred Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, by replacing the main character with José, adapting the dialogues accordingly and ocasionally substituting the nephews with José's own nephews, Zico and Zeca. The resulting stories were visually convincing, but removed much of José Carioca's personality, turning him into a generic character, so that he could be easily adapted into any type of story for filling up the pages of his comic book. Unsurprisingly, Brazilian fans are not fond of this period and mockingly refer to it as Zé Fraude ("Fraud José"). Thankfully, by the end of the decade, the Brazilian team of Disney artists had already expanded and was fully able to make brand-new stories starring José Carioca and other characters, without having to resort to any type of adaptation. This allowed José to have his personality again and made way for the creation of his own universe in the comics, with new supporting characters and distinctive storylines.
• Persepolis 2.0 uses the drawings from Persepolis to explain the 2009 Iranian election.
• MAD #11, published in 1954, features perhaps the earliest known example. Cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, operating under a tight deadline and in desperate need of content, lifted the EC Comics story "Murder the Husband" (originally from Crime SuspenStories #12) and replaced all the dialogue with jokes, non-sequitors and a variety of untranslated foreign languages, appropriately enough titled "Murder the Story."
• Parts of The Smurfs comic book stories and the 1980s cartoon show were used for the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Smurfed Behind: The Departure".
  • As the cover image◊ for "I Dream Of Smurfette": Hefty wakes up and finds out something is wrong...
  • A portion of "King Smurf" gets turned into this◊.
  • Brainy's idea of "Christianity" turns off even his mirror reflection◊.
  • And speaking of The Smurfs, the comic book version of "The Clockwork Smurf" was an official remixed version of a multi-part story ad that originally featured a Product Placement character (an anthropomorphic jar of Benco chocolate drink powder).
• Atari Force's "Mission: Phoenix", the comic book story that was included with the Atari 2600 version of Phoenix, was originally scripted as a story for the spinoff arcade game Liberator, with the Malaglon originally resembling frogs.
• Muh Phoenix is this to Avengers vs. X-Men, making up sillier reasons for the eponymous conflict and turning every character into either a perverted psychopath, a foul-mouthed jerkass, or exaggerating any bad character trait they already have.
• A French series takes Tintin panels and enters new dialogue that turns Tintin into a racist asshole, Haddock into a reactionary old fart, the Thompsons into hipsters, and Calculus into a pretentious artist.
• What If Crisis On Infinite Earths Was A Marvel Comics Group Event? is a reimagining of DC Comics' Crisis on Infinite Earths with Marvel Comics characters drawn in the place of their DC Comics counterparts, with the Watcher taking the place of the Monitor.

Manga

• Azumanga Daioh lends itself well to remixes: The Comprehensive Kriegsaffe No. 9 is a notable, NSFW one. Warning: contains traces of Cthulu.
• The website Japanator has taken to editing Yotsuba&! comics to discuss things like the anime industry, the popularity of Moe, and...other things. Cheerful Child, indeed.
• Cry Some More remixes badly written Yaoi Genre manga (and webcomics) such as Love Pistols.
• Perhaps the most prominent example is Doraemon remixes in Vietnam. Due to Vietnam having lots and lots of devoted Doraemon fans, it is no surprise that the country has left a vast library of remixes.
  • It isn't exactly known when Doraemon remix community in Vietnam emerged, but we do know that the 2011-2014 period is considered the Golden Age of the community, with remix competitions, compilations, remixes that serve as original stories, and even Fanvids on YouTube using frames sourced from the scans. Heck, there were a handful of Facebook pages created solely for sharing and/or creating remixes! Unfortunately, most of them no longer exist.
  • And, by the way, there's a GitHub repository for resources to make your own Doraemon remixes. Go check it out.
• Chainsaw Man had an unofficial Brazilian "scanlation" that was often profane and politically incorrect, and became very popular before the official version came out in 2020. Unfortunadely, some of its fans took the wrong way to express their frustration that the anime's dub did not draw from it, even making Future Devil dubber Guilherme Briggs quit social media after being harrassed.

Newspaper Comics

• Dysfunctional Family Circus may have been the ultimate Remix Comic, spawning a community that generated countless remixed captions for 500 Bil Keane The 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.
  • There are also Jersey Circus and The Nietzsche Family Circus, which use Jersey Shore and random Nietzsche quotes, respectively.
  • Added bonus: Pearls Before Swine is an "official" version of this. Sometimes copy/pasting wholesale, other times just using the characters.
• 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 strips the political rhetoric of the original comic and replaces it with the word "dicks" repeated over and over again.
• These remixes of the 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.
  • This charming charlie takes individual Peanuts panels and replaces the dialogue with lyrics from songs by The Smiths.
• The defunct Bradley and the Jumpy Tiger takes Calvin and Hobbes and rewrites it to talk about other subject matter, usually then-current pop culture. The main Running Gag is Bradley being forced to watch Tickle U (Cartoon Network's then-current, ill-fated preschool block) and being denied Ed, Edd n Eddy.
  • The same creator made these one-off remixes of C&H, featuring a role reversed version of the first strip, one strip with the characters remade as those of Foxtrot, Calvin telling Dad about the new Foxtrot book, Calvin's dad complaining about Ed, Edd n Eddy, and Calvin getting caught playing Kameo and attempting to explain it as watching Monsters, Inc..
  • Calvin and Muad'Dib replaces the dialogue from Calvin and Hobbes with equally philosophical lines from Dune.
• Parodied in a story arc of Pearls Before Swine where Rat breaks into the office of the comics industry (it's a long story), and discovers the computer where all the files to the comics are stored. He then replaces all their dialogue with quotes from Benito Mussolini, followed by the The Family Circus strip that resulted.
  • Another time, he went strip-hopping and wrote his own dialogue for Luann.
  • And yet another time, he made a parody of his own strip, "Pearls Without Pig".
• iToons: Square Root of Minus Garfield without the hassle of only using Garfield.

Webcomics

• MegaTokyo is possibly the place to go for rescripts. Fans have been at it since 2004 and may have improved over time. Their monthly rescript challenge started spontaneously when someone threw down the gauntlet to rescript using only William Shakespeare. Since then, the theme changes each month. Recent examples have included bloopers, famous movie lines and ... umm... tvtropes.
  • And there's also Negatokyo, the comic where Largo is turned into an Uncle Tomfoolery rapist who is aware of his surroundings, Piro is even more of a loser, and Subasa speaks You No Take Candle.
• Over 200 remixes (counting image macros, but not forum avatars) were made from the webcomic Erfworld. Thanks to a Creative Commons license, they can be legally shared without having to ask for permission in advance; most can be found in two threads on the official forums
• The creators of No Need for Bushido have separate official sections on their website for fanmixes made by other people and non-canon remixes made by themselves.
• Dinosaur Comics is entirely based on this concept. The first strip was a Cut and Paste Comic of clip-art, but almost every one after that has been a remix of the first, with only the dialogue changed. (See also... the Dinosaur Comics page.)
  • Special mention has to go to when Dinosaur Comics gets turned into a class project in an English class in Japan.
  • Similarly, there's Penny Arcade Remix
• The fan forum for College Roomies from Hell!!! has a running 'Perviverse' thread in which the fans (and in some case, the original author) post 'rescripts' in which the dialog has been replaced with rather unsubtle innuendo[1]. This eventually spawned a thread of clean rescripts in reply[2].
• POKETTO MONSUTAA SPECIAL SUPER EX ADVENTURE XXXVX THE CHRONICLES OF RED BLUE GREEN AND A BUNCH OF OTHER KIDS WITH COLORS FOR NAMES is a remix comic using the Pokémon Special manga. This one tends to edit the art to a degree as well.
• The El Goonish Shive forum also has one of these: the Strip Slaying thread (the old forum's thread can be found here).
• "Strip slays" of Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire are quite popular among the comic's “ironic” fans.
  • Vitriolic blogger John Solomon also attempted a Remix of the entire comic strip, entitled Dominic Durgan as a parody of its writing and art style. He himself admits it was created in one night and is profoundly juvenile.
• A particularly infamous image board has instituted something called the CAD rule for "improving" the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. In its most common incarnation, you remove the middle two panels and put the first and last in sequence, and then remove the dialogue from the last. A large repository can be found on the troll site Encyclopedia Dramatica, which is not safe for work and probably not safe for people with marginally weak stomachs, too. The same image board also likes to play with Sonic comics, and a single panel from a Chick Tract; in the latter case, the original dialogue was probably "This is a sandwich."
• DM of the Rings and Darths & Droids both follow this concept... working with screencaps of the LoTR and Star Wars films and adding their own dialogue.
  • The Nanoha GamerS comic does this with screencaps of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS and rewrites it as an RPG Anime of sorts, in the vein of .hack// and City of Heroes.
• The Bob and George forum had a custom comic thread that went over 250 pages long, with its own in-jokes. Unfortunately lost now, due to the forums being deleted.
• Looking for Group fans have been rescripting more and more when producing motivators.
• Irregular Webcomic! has recently invited people to do remixes.
• Brawl in the Family has a large "mashup" thread on the forums.
• On the Freefall forum the practice is known as "filking" (allegedly because a comic remix is like a filksong in the sense that new words are added to existing music/graphics.
  • Early in '04, a particularly active filker looking for a bigger challenge invented the klif, a reverse filk that not only did all the strips from the beginning in chronological order but flipped each strip left/right. Strange as it may sound, the experiment continued with some intervals for a whole three years, eventually doing all (some 900) strips that had been released before the thread started.
• These have become increasingly popular on the Gunnerkrigg Court forums, with two whole threads devoted to posting them. A few distinct memes have evolved: editing Boxbot into a scene thereby making it "terrible", adding party hats to character's heads, giving the characters laser eyes, and altering dialogue to read "Okay that is quite enough thank you".
• In The KAMics the author himself did this with some of his comics under the title Remix Theatre.
• A popular activity on the Awkward Zombie forums is to remix the most recent comic with past comics.
  • Typically, the Dominion Rod (source) will come up at least once, as well as Katie's dad asking where someone gets gas (source), an Entei with someone yelling "ARGRARJGHH" (source), and Nowi asking another character if he wants to start a relationship with her (source).
• The Penny and Aggie forum has the Random Strip Manip thread, in which fans use the Random.org True Random Number Generator to choose a random strip for this purpose (or simply pick any strip they like). This has inspired the creation of collaborative Crack Fic remix storylines with Spy Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror twists, and a heaping helping of Ho Yay.
• The "Law For Kids" comics produced by the Arizona and South Carolina state governments have been popular targets for LUE and 4chan users.
• Twokinds fans do the panel shuffle.
• (As mentioned in the manga section) Cry Some More riffs bad Yaoi Genre comics - the vast majority of them being webcomics. Such as Starfighter and Shark Teeth. When she did a riff on Teahouse the writers complained and got her booted off both Livejournal and Photobucket due to copyright, even though she has fair use - so she moved to another site.
• The Photo Comic A Softer World gives us a variation has been attracting these lately. See for yourself.
• The Bitstrips-associated Stop Bullying gives users the option to make their own comics and many have taken advantage of this.
• Making XKCD Slightly Worse is, well making xkcd slightly worse.
• TGCaps.com is devoted to remix comics with transgender themes.
• Mountain Time has done this a few times; one example turns this into this.
• Remixes of Questionable Content are sometimes posted to the /r/questionablecontent/ subreddit. In particular, Reddit user Squirrelclamp has posted over 180 remixes as of 2022-04, usually satires of that day’s comic.
• cad comic [3] is a surreal remix of Ctrl+Alt+Del, in which people randomly gain powers for no reason and/or are oblivious to this being at all weird.

Western Animation

• Ridiculously easy to exploit with My Life Me and its online "manga" maker.
• There's also the Arthur Comic Creator, which has achieved memetic status.
• Dark Simpsons uses uncaptioned, unedited screenshots of The Simpsons to tell stories filled with Black Comedy, tragedy, revenge, homicide, etc.

Other

• The mini-comic that came with the first wave of Transformers: Armada toys, originally stuffed with the same dialogue in three languages, took on a life of its own thanks to TF fan Matt Marshall deciding to poke fun at the stilted prose by rewriting the comic to be as silly as possible. The result is Armada - The REAL Story, which tells the story of the mentally-impaired but well-meaning Autobot Hot Shot's quest for something known only as "JaAm" while Optimus Prime wonders where his feet are and Cyclonus tries to figure out what the hell his alt-mode is supposed to be.
• Something Awful particularly loves to do this to any type of comic (especially anything with its own Mock Thread); Zalgo is one common variation (example◊).
• The Zootopia fancomic I Will Survive has had this done to it many a time, most likely as the result of the strange subject matter (An anthropomorphic fox and bunny from a children's film argue about whether or not to get an abortion).
• "Bertstrips" are a series of out-of-context screenshots from Sesame Street with captions on them that essentially turn the characters into murderous psychopaths.