Garfield: Just look at me. What do I have to show for myself?

Garfield is the sort of comic that does so many things wrong that it's easy to forget the things it does right. Garfield Minus Garfield has sort of rectified that, but today's installment is the rare instance in which the titular character's presence actually makes the comic better and, in this case, sadder.

Garfield: Why do I even bother to keep myself up?

Here we see Garfield attempting to seduce Jon, trying to recapture the good old days, back when Jon was even more pathetic and lonely than he is now. Back when he would occasionally have a few too many with his microwave dinner and forget the arbitrary rules of decorum that define relationships between man and pet. Back when they were young. Back when Garfield was happy.

Garfield: Cliff was a lousy dancer.

Ha ha! Gay!

Garfield: BOOT!

Whenever Garfield begins to feel the weight of his monotonous existence, on the other hand, he just partakes of a little sadism, and all is right with the world.

Garfield: I keep a framed picture of Liz beside my bed...

In which Jon and Garfield compare masturbatory aids.

Breaking: Everybody Loves Calvin and Hobbes.

Nevin Martell, author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, has a short essay in The Guardian about how awesome Calvin and Hobbes is:

The strip's authenticity is secured by Watterson's refusal to sell out. He didn't become a cartoonist for the attention, the accolades or the money. He just wanted to create the best comic strip possible. As he once wrote in the introduction to a Krazy Kat collection, "[W]e seem to have forgotten that a comic strip can be something more than a launch pad for a glut of derivative products. When the comic strip is not exploited, the medium can be a vehicle for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression." So, instead of embracing the fame his work afforded him over the years, he gave only a handful of interviews, rarely appeared in public and maintained a very modest lifestyle. He was equally withholding of his creations, whom he never allowed to be merchandised. There were no Hobbes dolls, no Spaceman Spiff action figures and no coffee mugs with Calvin and Hobbes one-liners splashed across them. Considering that all his peers were cashing in on their creations – Charles Schulz (Peanuts) and Jim Davis (Garfield) each earned tens of millions of dollars a year at the height of their fame – it was a tack that was as admirable as it was confounding.

Readers may have never thought about Watterson's personal choices when they read the strip, but that strength of character echoed throughout his work. Calvin and Hobbes is complex, thoughtful and thought provoking. Calvin and Hobbes aren't plastic and one-dimensional, like so many of their contemporaries on the funny pages whose creators strove to make them explicable in a single sentence. Garfield is a fat, lazy cat who loves to eat and give his owner grief. Beetle Bailey is an inept and lazy army private who is forever running afoul of his superiors. That's all you need to know to laugh at either of those characters (and lazy is the operative word here). Now we come to Calvin and Hobbes – a hyper-imaginative kid and his pet tiger who may or may not be real, depending on who's looking at him. But that's just the surface. That doesn't really begin to explain Watterson's unique storytelling device in which readers switch between the world as Calvin sees it – a fantastical place – and as adults see it – a cut 'n' dried conventional reality. You need to immerse yourself in Calvin and Hobbes to truly understand it. Sure, you could read one strip, get the gag and move on with your life, but you'd be missing out.

Not exactly hard hitting stuff, but mostly true. Except maybe for the whole "Isn't Bill Watterson amazing for not licensing his characters!" thing you hear about all the time. I fully respect Watterson for sticking to his principles, but, look, a comic strip--like art in general--is a commercial enterprise. While I'm always up for a little Garfield bashing--and to be sure, this shit here is pretty heinous--Jim Davis "selling out" hasn't actually change the quality of the comic strip. Garfield isn't mediocre because its title character has appeared on lunch boxes. It's mediocre because Davis rarely pushes at the bounds of the thin premise Martell so accurately describes. And Calvin and Hobbes, meanwhile, isn't any less great because of all those dumbass, unlicensed decals you see in the back windows of pickup trucks.

Garfield: Well, the polar ice caps are melting.

Look, I'm not exactly falling down laughing, but Garfield deserves props for even a very mild joke that acknowledges that global warming actually is real* and we should therefore probably do something about it. There's very little upside for Paws Inc. to be writing a comic like this, while there is a very real chance that some stupid people will write into their local papers complaining about the vast left-wing conspiracy this supposedly family-friendly comic is so clearly complicit in. Garfield's enough of an institution that it can no doubt survive occasional assaults like that, but that doesn't mean its writers would necessarily want to endure them at all.

*And not just cause it's hot outside or something.

Garfield: We wanna watch you and Liz.

This comic is hilarious because Garfield and Odie have been waiting 30 years to live vicariously through their pathetic owner, and they're not going to pass up the chance to masturbate to his fumbling sexual antics now.

Garfield: I finally nailed it back down!

This Garfield, as usual, would be better without Garfield. But even with Garfield, it's pretty good, mostly because it manages a degree of subtlety that Paws Inc. rarely attempts. The funny part of the comic is Jon's bandaged hand. Garfield's cheap punchline is mostly just a distraction.

Archie and Garfield: 44usa

These stamps are hilarious because they feature characters from comic strips.

In all seriousness, both Archie and Garfield have made substantial marks on popular culture and deserve whatever enshrinement they get. So congratulations to Jim Davis and all the folks who have been involved with the various Archie series over the years.

All that said, the Internet indicates that the last time the Post Office put out stamps with comic strips on them was 1995, in their Comic Strip Classics collection, which was limited to strips that debuted before 1950. Pogo, which debuted in 1941 and was therefore eligible, was for some reason nevertheless not included. And it has now been displaced by Garfield. Which, again, is not to say that Garfield doesn't deserve to be honored for its immense commercial success and all the fans it has brought to the comics section. But Pogo has a legitimate claim to being the greatest comic strip ever produced. Something's amiss here.

UPDATE: As Jaime Weinman notes in the comments, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey and Dennis the Menace are all getting honored with commemorative stamps this year as well.* Still no Pogo, though.

Calvin is obviously very deserving, and though it might not be so obvious now, so is Dennis, both for its cultural impact and for Hank Ketcham's artwork. I concur with Jaime that Beetle Bailey is less deserving, though I don't really think it's any less deserving than Garfield is. Jim Davis has done more with various corporate tie-ins, but Mort Walker probably deserves some sort of recognition for all the popular comics he's created over the years and that, for better or worse, continue to fill up the comics section to this day. There are other comics, even other than Pogo, that I would have chosen in their place, but I can't necessarily complain about either of them receiving an honor.

It's probably also worth mentioning that Bill Mauldin is getting a stamp, too. Beetle Bailey doesn't hold up very well when compared to something like this.

*How I managed to spend half an hour scouring the Internet for prior instances of comic strip stamps without learning this information I have no idea.

Garfield and The Family Circus: I wish the Pilgrims had sent out for PIZZA on the first Thanksgiving 'stead of shootin' a turkey.

Is this really going to be Billy's future? Is he really destined to lead the sad, sad life of a Jon Arbuckle? And after I had such high hopes for him?

Garfield: 101 Cruel Things To Do

This comic is hilarious because Garfield is a sadist.

Garfield: Make it a table for T-H-R-E-E.

This comic is hilarious because Garfield can spell.

Garfield: There isn't a security camera there, is there?

This comic is hilarious because Garfield murders young children.

Garfield: We're bachelors, baby.

This Garfield does a good job illustrating why Garfield Minus Garfield works so well. Garfield's presence adds nothing to this comic and, in almost every way, makes it worse.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy: Do you have any regrets, Charlie Brown?

Friend of the blog, or at least the Twitter feed, Alex brings word of Peanuts Minus Snoopy, which I guess was sort of inevitable in the wake of Garfield Minus Garfield. The genius of Garfield Minus Garfield, of course, is that it changes the focus of a terrible comic and in so doing makes it a pretty great comic.

In Garfield the focus is always on Garfield: Garfield likes lasagna; Garfield likes to crush spiders; Garfield likes to torture dogs; Garfield likes to mock his owner; Garfield thinks he's way funnier than he actually is; etc. Removing Garfield shifts the focus of the strip onto Jon Arbuckle, whose pathos had always been obscured by the wisecracking of his dumbass cat. And so the comic becomes something genuinely different and smarter and better.

Peanuts Minus Snoopy, on the other hand, takes a great strip and turns it into...something slightly less great.

Unlike Garfield, Snoopy isn't really the focus of his strip. Peanuts is an ensemble; Snoopy is an important player, but Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy and Sally are all just as important. And so removing Snoopy doesn't change the focus of the comic in the way that removing Garfield from his eponymous strip does. Peanuts is about the struggles of childhood. Peanuts Minus Snoopy is...about the struggles of childhood.

This isn't to say that Peanuts Minus Snoopy is a disaster or anything. Far from it. It's an interesting experiment. It puts a finer point on some of the non-Snoopy relationships. It provides some pretty decent surreal humor. But it isn't as good as the originals. More often than not, it just feels like a pretty good comic strip that's missing something.

Garfield: It's a lasagna-shaped cake!

Help me out here. With the exception of the round ones, aren't all cakes lasagna-shaped?

Garfield: You're counting cake slices, aren't you?

That's today's Garfield. It is hilarious because Garfield likes to eat.

As bad as the comic strip is, though, it's nothing compared to what Jim Davis has let happen with the various Garfield tie-in projects. Take this, for example:


(via Batrock)

Stuff like the above might lead one to believe that Davis is a talentless hack who's only in cartooning for the money. And that's probably mostly true. But every once in a while he's capable of doing something good. To wit, this strip from just last week displays a remarkably solid understanding of animal behavior:

It was, of course, sandwiched between yet more "Garfield likes food" gags, so it reads as something of a fluke. Indeed, it's entirely possible that it's supposed to be a mere "Odie is an idiot" joke. But the fact remains that the comic is a perfect illustration of positive reinforcement. It would be nice if Davis focused more of his attention on similarly sharp observations, as Garfield is almost always at its strongest when Davis is treating his characters as animals, rather than as furry people.

For something better yet, take a look at this famous sequence of comics from 1989, in which we discover Garfield is dying or some such equally bizarre thing. It's really sort of brilliant and daring for a newspaper comic strip.

Of course, it would be more brilliant and daring if it weren't a direct rip-off of this far more impressive and moving Italian cartoon. (While Davis insists he hasn't seen the cartoon in question, that seems unlikely).



But, as this post here indicates, Davis has done other daring things with the Garfield character in a book called Garfield: His 9 Lives. I haven't actually gotten a chance to read the book, so I can't exactly attest to its quality, but Garfield apparently kills an old lady in it. So that's something.

Now that I'm at the end of it, I realize that this post is mostly just rambling nonsense. So in an attempt to retroactively add a vaguely positive thesis, I'll say this: I don't really like it when authors are overly precious about their work. Whatever else one might say about Davis, at least he doesn't have that problem.

Garfield: We're the things you have to look forward to!

Garfield: taking anthropomorphism to new and annoying heights.

Garfield: Well, darn.

This comic is hilarious because Jon is going to suffocate on caulk.