This whole writing thing seems to have worked out pretty well for Stephen King, all things considered. Largely through novels and short stories, but also occasional screenplays and teleplays, King has become one of the most successful and well-known writers in modern history over the last four decades or so. But imagine for a moment that King’s career had gone in a slightly different direction, and he’d wound up writing jokes for comic strips like Blondie, Garfield, and The Lockhorns instead of dark horror tales. That’s the premise of Stephen King Funnies, a regularly updated series of images at the Tumblr of fantasy author Robert Levy. What Levy has been doing since July 2014 is to take King’s words and marry them to artwork taken directly from the funny pages. Oftentimes, it’s simply a matter of matching a King work with a thematically similar comic. Brant Parker and Johnny Hart’s The Wizard Of Id, for instance, is often about dungeons and imprisonment, so a Shawshank Redemption mashup seems like a natural.
In truth, King’s words are no more bleak than the average Id strip, so he fits right in as the author. Speaking of bleak things, Bil Keane’s theoretically heartwarming Family Circus gets paired with Children Of The Corn.
And hey, Snoopy’s always hunched over a typewriter, just like Jack Torrance of The Shining.
And the mashups continue from there: Garfield with Pet Sematary, The Far Side with The Dark Tower, Doonesbury with The Dead Zone. As an illustration, there is no better pairing here than Misery with The Lockhorns. The two complement each other perfectly.