Over the Hedge: Mom, Dad...there is no movie money.

Over the Hedge is almost certainly the most meta strip around today, as illustrated here by the reference to the movie tie-in. That doesn't necessarily make it good, of course; it often seems to be trying too hard for its own good. But that at least means it's trying, which is more than can be said about most of the stuff in the comics section.

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.