Our National Nightmare Is Over: You Can Now Pay To Have Someone PhotoShop You Into ‘Garfield’

In what is quite possibly the loosest definition of "New Technology" to ever make it into the newspaper, the Associated Press reported today that a new service is giving Garfield fans a chance to star alongside America's ninth most hilarious cartoon cat in a personalized strip, for a small fee.

This, of course, is something pretty much anyone with a computer and MS Paint can do already -- at this point, even the trickier practice of subtracting people from Garfield strips has been pretty much mastered -- but in addition to having the official seal of approval of Garfield creator Jim Davis (above) and the mighty Paws, Inc, the personalized strips also come in an animated format. And c'mon: Flash has only been around for 14 years.

In Typical Garfield fashion, the AP's article reads like a collection of words an old man heard and then tried to pass off to The Kids:

"This is a classic case of old school meets new tech," he said. "We're taking a comic strip that's been around for 30 years but is still relevant and we're putting it into what is a very new technology and into a mobile sort of app and then we're personalizing it."

A "mobile sort of app," huh Gramps? Sounds swell!

But to their credit, Pixfusion is offering its users a chance to try it out before they put down their hard-earned money for what their website assures me is a great Christmas gift -- and yes, there's a more romantic pack on the way for Valentine's day. So in the interest of informing ComicsAlliance readers about the service, I gave it a shot.

I decided to make one for my pal Brandon. He's neither younger than ten nor older than dirt, so he's not really a Garfield fan, but I thought he might like it. So let's pop over to Facebook, grab a picture of him, and let Pixfusion work its magic!

Ooooh, yeah. This is going to be a problem.

At present, it looks like while there are options for both men and women to be informed of how much Mondays suck, Garfield's non-Caucasian fans are going to have to pretend they're wearing khaki turtlenecks and gloves underneath their polo shirts. To be fair, though, when you're dealing with brand new cutting edge technology that's been around since 1996, there are bound to be a few bugs in the system. Maybe they'll fix that one in the update.

Even so, I'm hoping this catches on and expands to other newspaper comics. I'd love to have the option to give my friends some laughs by dropping them into my favorite strip: