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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

5 Comments

  1. Kit Power
    October 12, 2016 @ 9:26 am

    Cor, bloody hell this is good work. I don’t have anything useful to add. but thanks, looking forward to more.

    Also, I’d be very interested in your take on Calvin and Hobbes if you ever fancied it.

    Reply

  2. Austin Loomis
    October 12, 2016 @ 1:30 pm

    “The strip itself is not boring or banal, it is about boredom and banality, and this is the perilously razor-thin line it always must walk.”

    In other words, it’s raised boredom to an art form.

    “It is much more accurate, in my experience, to suppose that existence is one constant, unbroken now of experiential presence. We only experience that which we call time in the present, because the present is all there ever was and all there ever will be. ‘Time’, as we think of it, does not exist.”

    Just ask Alan Moore. 🙂

    Reply

  3. David Brain
    October 12, 2016 @ 5:21 pm

    Garfield’s pasts looks a lot like his futures

    I admit that I misread this as “Garfield’s pasta…” and wondered if you were about to make some comment about lasagna being multi-layered.

    And I definitely agree with your general thesis. I have often assumed that the reason people devour “celebrity” autobiographies is because they at least have days that don’t just instantly disappear into the black hole of nothingness. And we envy that.

    Reply

  4. Wood
    October 13, 2016 @ 8:25 am

    I remember being maybe twelve, thirteen, and delivering newspapers, and Garfield would frequently send my preadolescent self into gales of laughter.

    I saw your first post though and was like, what? But this is a really interesting project. Hooked.

    Reply

  5. Daibhid Ceannaideach
    October 13, 2016 @ 10:10 pm

    I believe Garfield has had just one epoch-changing shift; Jon starting an actual relationship with Liz the vet, thereby removing “Jon has bad luck with women” as one of the tools in the Davis repertoire.

    I think this originally happened to tie in with the movie and then stayed as something that happened even though the movie wasn’t terribly popular. (Probably because a CGI Garfield who looks like a cross between a Garfield soft toy and Tim Burton’s Cheshire Cat, interacting with real animals, is even freakier than the CGI Scooby-Doo.)

    Reply

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