I didn't research it, but I'm pretty sure that if someone was to make a top of the most well known pop-culture items from around the world, the comic strip Garfield would come up high. Jim Davis (now, with an army of assistants that can defy Jeff Koon's forces, probably) has been writing and drawing the sloth-like selfish cat since 1978 and I usually check every new strip daily. After almost 40 years, it manages to still be vaguely amusing at least a couple of times per week, and somewhat funny up to three times every month, so I guess you can't ask for much more. And that's it, because from the start it has been worried solely with the gags and rarely got any conscious about anything or deep (there are exceptions, like that infamous storyline with disturbing future implications from October 23 to October 28, 1989). If it had tried to explore more complex themes than Garfield's bored-to-cruel range of attitudes or how Jon's dates go awry every time on a regular basis, like others comics do, it certainly wouldn't be so recognizable and well-placed in that hypothetical list I mentioned. And it didn't because it strived to become something else, which it did with complete success: Garfield is no longer a comic, it's a billion-dollar merchandising operation. But we have other options now, and today I offer three different ways of approaching and reading this everlasting tale that can get really amusing and very profound.
Permanent Monday is a blog started in April 2006 which features more than two hundred analyzes of strips, all of them sober, impartial and eloquent (well, not all of them, but he uses the French word ennui sometimes, so...). The exegesis go through each one panel by panel, exploring some of the most typical devices used by Davis to develop the plots, detailing the most common mischiefs of the fat feline, deconstructing dialogues, questioning the reasons for the characters' actions, interpreting options from philosophical perspective, describing the plight spiders, curtains and Odie go through, listing what we should be wary of, revealing obscure facts, and so on. The texts by Chris Stangl are so excessive that they become quite hilarious, even more when the content being analyzed isn't any humorous, and are definitely worth checking out, although unfortunately the blog has been quiet since May 2010. Start here, here, here or anywhere really.
Then we have Lasagna Cat, a channel on YouTube featuring videos of some of the strips performed by actors with both attention to detail and a very naïf aesthetic. They just changed the medium, that's it (the three ideas I'm talking about are incredible simple in essence, as you can see). Considering Garfield has been on TV since 1982 it's unbelievable no one had thought of this before. Unfortunately there are only 28 videos online (from November 2007 to January 2008), but they are so good. Just a faithful recreation of the panels (I think they made an effort to choose particularly unfunny ones) and then a song. It's awesome. I hope it stopped because its creators got rich immediately, they deserve it. So badly!
Even more remarkable is Garfield without Garfield, which started in February 2008 when Dan Walsh decided to get his hands on the obese quadruped's strips and get his indolent, glutton and sadistic being out of them (and sometimes adding tears to great effect). And the other characters too. Only Jon Arbuckle remains. And when only Jon remains, his eccentricities and shortcomings cease being the inspiration for Garfield's sarcasm and a few laughs. With everyone else gone, everything in Jon's life becomes agonizing and you as a reader get utterly distraught. Without Garfield's idleness, Jon's constant desperation over noting turn the strips into some of the most harrowing and aching the whole genre of sequential art as ever seen. Jon's failures, melancholy, loneliness and hopelessness go from funny to dismal. You feel emotionally shattered after this insight into his tortured mind, your soul crushed for having ever laughed at a man who clearly needs to be institutionalized.
It's not like Jon doesn't know how to have a good time without Garfield, but eventually the fun ends and when too much weird stuff keeps happening in a man's life, he will probably just lose it and go bananas, cuckoo, nuts, bonkers. Jon loses sense of who he is, imagines being more than one, starts making people up, talks with things, goes paranoid, but still manages to have some happy moments. But then comes the failures, and in his coherent moments Jon realizes how terrible his life is, how he is going nowhere and has squandered his chances. Sleep isn't an option to escape all of this, and scenes from his life start to look straight out of an horror movie. Slowly, he comes to understand he is doing nothing on this Earth and that leads to self-harm and a constant sense of angst and utter despair. After all this, is it better thinking he is talking to a cat all the time? I don't think so (and neither does Realfield). You'll understand why this strip only features three panels: the forth will always have him killing himself.
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