Garfield

There is possibly no relationship in Garfield that better exemplifies the classic “Love/Hate” dynamic than that between the titular cat and The Dog Next Door. Much as he does in his other work relationships in the strip, Garfield dutifully clocks in to go over to Jon’s neighbour’s yard and get violently and angrily barked at by their dog. Absurd, yes, but how many of us work eight (or twelve, or eighteen) hour days in a job where we’re only disrespected and demeaned? Some people are particularly unlucky enough to have a boss who seems to do nothing but scream and verbally abuse them. Those sorts of people might as well be a dumb, vicious guard dog with an explosively hair trigger temper.

But Garfield does still have an amiable relationship with The Dog Next Door. His design shows him to be a friendly chap when he’s not on the clock, and he and Garfield have shown on multiple occasions they can get along just fine if they want to. Indeed, I think they not-so-secretly enjoy the unique relationship they share: They will speak of love and hate as if they’re interchangeable emotions (and in some cases, I guess they can be) and they often make it clear to us and to each other they value and treasure the special time they spend together. How you interpret this probably depends a great deal on how cynical you are. Are we so starved for love, affection and companionship that we latch onto whatever relationship we happen to find ourselves in, no matter how abusive or destructive? Or, rather, is it more the case that we are all of us more similar than not and, if we were able to shed our borders, walls and categories we would come to understand that even sworn enemies can find common ground?

Today, however, it’s business as usual, even though it doesn’t appear to be at first glance. There’s no barking and hissing, but even the most seemingly pleasant of conversations can hide hidden daggers and machinations. There is in truth no difference between debating and fighting, and this is a truth Garfield and The Dog Next Door know better than anyone-Watch how, over the course of today’s strip, the two animal-neighbours deftly navigate the verbal minefield they have laid for each other. The Dog opens by asking the question “Heard the news?”. In doing so, he is attempting to secure himself a position of power and authority over his interlocutor: Knowledge is Power, The Dog Next Door knows something Garfield doesn’t, and he wants to make sure Garfield knows it. Why else would he phrase his question in such vague terms? Lots of news happens every day, and there’s no way Garfield could be expected to know which particular news The Dog was referring to.

Indeed, in this day in age we are our own newspapers and our own newspaper censors. We only expose ourselves to the news that concerns or interests us (or tells us what we want or expect to hear, no matter how horrific that might be), so we can probably safely assume The Dog’s “news” is implicitly and by definition only going to be something that interests and concerns him, as a dog.…

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Garfield is made great by the thin line it walks between comfort and banality. The strip is defined in equal parts by both concepts, and it’s impossible to have one without the other. Indeed, when it is one, it is so precisely because it is also the other at the same time. Like everything about Garfield, its running gags play into this: We expect to see them and thus enjoy the thrill of recognition when we do. And while the strip can dispense a seemingly endless series of variations on the same handful of setups, the structure itself must always remain fundamentally comforting, familiar, recognisable and, necessarily, banal.

Like the Wise Man of the Mountain we looked at last time, Garfield’s Echo Point is a running gag whose setup is based around one of our characters (usually the cat in question) interacting with an unseen aspect of Nature outside of the panel. And this time, it’s a comedic double-act built out of a literal call-and-response. Garfield reads the sign, understands that this is a place where echoes can be heard and meows into the canyon awaiting some kind of answer. Usually he gets one. In these strips then Garfield is more often than not playing the straight man again, with the punchline coming in the form of the comedic response the echo provides him with.

An echo is a captivating, almost magical thing. It’s a disembodied sound, sometimes your own voice, reverberating off of the surrounding landscape and coming back to you in such a way it seems as if it’s materializing out of thin air. Or, perhaps more accurately, as if it’s coming back to you from somewhere across the horizon. This is, after all, the sensory experience of an echo: The feeling that there’s someone somewhere in a faraway land who can hear what you’re saying, is listening, and responding back in turn. And yet, they can only respond by repeating what you yourself just said, as if they are your own ghost or shadow-self. Garfield itself has already explored this sensation, having the punchline of one Echo Point strip from a Sunday in 2011 be two cats meowing to each other from across the canyon’s expanse, with neither aware of the other’s existence. Cleverly, the Echo Point backdrop in that strip is mirrored across the divide between the final two panels, with Garfield and his interlocutor walking away marveling at the natural wonder. For of course, neither can see what or who exists beyond the boundaries of the comic strip panel’s border.

This time, the response comes in the form of a text message on Garfield’s smartphone (there is the inherent ludicrousness of a housecat owning a smartphone, but Garfield stands in for the modern human. Isn’t it just as ludicrous that statistically everyone has one of those things?). On its own, a telephone can be read as a suitable metaphor for the sensory experience of an echo: An unseen, perhaps even ghostly, presence on the other end of the line is listening to and interacting with you.…

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While out walking, Garfield comes across a hill. There’s a sign planted next to the hill, indicating that Paradise can be found at the top.

This hill is different from the ones we normally see in Garfield; rounded moguls upon which the cat will lay back and look up at the clouds on a warm summer day. The prominence appears quite challenging even for a seasoned climber, which is probably part of the reason Garfield has the reaction he does upon seeing it. The general design indicates less a typical Garfield hill and more a location that showed up in the strip a few times in the earlier part of the decade: A jagged, rocky mountain whose summit we cannot see from the vantage point of the strip, but upon which dwells a Wise Man whom Jon tells us “has a long beard” and “says grand things about life”. To further the continuity link, one Wise Man strip features a sign that literally says “Wise Man” partway up the mountain, a kind of spiritual road sign or mile marker, with an arrow helpfully pointing to the summit, much as the sign for “Paradise” does here.

We can read the prominence in this strip as the same as the Wise Man’s mountain, albeit within Garfield‘s established framework of negative continuity, because the strip’s nonverbal associative iconography makes us recognise the shapes and symbols of things, if not the details. It’s also thus not a problem that the mountain seems to be small enough to be covered in grass here, where in all its previous appearances it was a craggy peak, because although it had always been rocky before it had always been drawn differently in each of its previous appearances. Perhaps this also goes a way to making Garfield‘s setting feel more generic, and thus more relatable, as unless you happen to live somewhere near the American Cordillera, Alps, Himalaya or some other major mountain range, it’s likely there aren’t any mountains like that near your house. Perhaps though we’re just at the very base of the mountain this time (worthy of note is that this is the first Wise Man-style strip to open on a typical Garfield backdrop; all the others to date have been set in unique and quite atypical locales), which would tie neatly into the strip’s central joke.

We stand at outset, faced with the prospect of beginning a long and potentially arduous journey towards enlightenment. Indeed, nothing less than Paradise. And Garfield rejects the call, or rather, he rejects this call.

Mountain veneration and asceticism is common throughout Eastern spiritual philosophies, from the famous Tibetan Buddhism to the Five Mountains of Taoism to the Yamabushi of Japan. Although it’s from Eastern beliefs that the pop culture notion of the “wise mountain hermit” is probably derived today, mountain veneration is certainly not a practice limited to them, with parallels being found in belief systems the world over. Perhaps due to their height and structure or just because of their awe, mountains are seen as places that bring us closer to the gods, and to spiritual enlightenment.…

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“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit-love.”

-Morihei Ueshiba

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In Garfield, everything has a voice, or has the potential to have one. Birds, mice, spiders and household appliances (not to mention cats and dogs) all have readable internal dialogue. Everything has a soul. Everything is a potential spiritual agent. Naturally it’s only the animals, plants and objects who display regular awareness of this fact, because Garfield is about Western modernity and we as humans have forgotten such things in our society. Recall, however, that it is us as the audience who have privileged access to the thoughts and concerns of these creatures even as the humans in the strip do not. There’s hope for us yet.

(Of course, the strip goes back on forth about this depending on what makes the better joke on that day. If you are still looking for the laws of physics underlining the “Garfield universe” you are manifestly missing the point of this series and are approaching it utterly the wrong way.)

This level of awareness comes, however, at the price of extremely heightened empathy. Those who feel deeply their connection to the myriad other souls in nature may also find their feelings of suffering and loss to be magnified as well. Especially in the West and Westernized cultures, where collective institutionalized violence and depersonalization have become so normalized. Garfield himself expressed concern over this in a strip decades ago: Jon once asked him “Wouldn’t it be great if these walls could talk? Imagine the stories they could tell”. To which Garfield responded (for our benefit, of course, not Jon’s) “Every time a light bulb burned out it would be like a death in the family”. Hearing the voices of others compels you to listen, and to treat the speakers with the same respect and personhood you would wish for yourself.

This is the scenario the first panel sets the audience up for. Garfield stands over the tree stump, implied to be of the same tree he is frequently seen climbing, wondering what happened to it. Garfield and this tree have a relationship which, like his relationship with the dog next door, is humoursly likened to a human nine-to-five punchclock job. Garfield climbs the tree and goes next door to get barked at by the dog because that’s what he “does”, in the modern definition of the word: When we ask what a person “does”, we’re really asking how they sell their labour because of how ubiquitous capitalism has become to Westernism. So the joke in those situations is pointing out the absurdity of the way we schedule our lives in Western modernity by showing how silly it is when other animals and plants, who are no less “natural” than humans are at their core, engage in the same behaviour. It’s grafting a Western capitalist kind of relationship onto a fundamentally innate, intimate natural one.

But that’s all tangential, because that’s not what this joke is about. It is, however necessary context for Garfield’s reaction in the first panel. There’s a quote in one of the last episodes of the UK version of The Office where Martin Freeman’s character muses about how ironically poignant office coworker relationships are: We work our lives away every day, and, as a result, we get to know the people we work with far better than we do the friends and family we *choose* to spend time with, simply because of the clockwork regularity with which we see them, and the sheer scope of how long that time truly is.…

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

Garfield and Friends was well known for its referential and self-aware style of comedy. Much of the humour from the second season onward was gleaned from poking fun at both pop culture and the capitalist industry that creates it thanks to its head writer Mark Evanier. Evanier is a veteran Hollywood jobbing scribe who was born, raised and still lives in Los Angeles, so he brings a very unique perspective to Garfield. For Evanier, celebrities and entertainers were his neighbours and fellow community members, and the business of making movies was the local industry. So when Garfield and Friends makes a joke about Hollywood agents or breaks the fourth wall and treats the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show as just another piece of primetime network television, this is not the series being especially perceptive and postmodern as much as it is Mark Evanier looking for inspiration in the people and things around him, and writing what he knows.

(Indeed, Mark Evanier’s secondary role as voice director is responsible for another thing Garfield and Friends is renowned for: Its frequent cameos from Hollywood luminaries of previous decades, mostly from stand-up comedy and the voice actor’s guild. Many of these performers had been functionally retired until Evanier had called them and asked them to guest star on Garfield.)

This puts Evanier and Garfield and Friends in staunch contrast to Jim Davis and the original strip upon which it is based. Far from being a Hollywood native who practically grew up in the business, Jim Davis was an Indiana farm boy who built Garfield and Paws, Inc. from the ground up as essentially a small business that wound up gaining international success. They are, by default, going to be operating from two wildly different positionalities and reference pools and have slightly different thematic interests (although it must be stressed that Davis and Evanier are incredibly close and have an extraordinary writing partnership: Evanier is, in fact, the only other person Davis trusts to write Garfield properly at a professional level).

So when Garfield the strip approaches looking at pop culture, it comes at it from a different angle then Garfield and Friends. The cartoon show takes the view of a deep, deep insider, cracking a *lot* of in-jokes that come squarely from Mark Evanier’s life experiences. In other words, those of an entertainment producer. The strip, by contrast, takes the view of the ordinary, everyday passive consumer of media entertainment, as we see in so many of the strips where Garfield is watching television and reacting to things he sees onscreen.

Which makes this strip, an overtly active diegetic parody of science fiction and broader genre fiction tropes, something of an oddity. Rather than snarking at a bad SF movie on TV, as he does from time to time, Garfield instead satirizes the genre himself within the basic workings of the strip itself.…

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

When we think of Garfield, we think of the mundane everyday. And when we think of the mundane everyday, we think of banal modern life. Indeed, this blog project’s forebear made a regular point of reading the strip as a brilliantly subversive example of effectively marketing ennui and despair: A savvy salesman hocking commiseration at the hopelessness of day-to-day punchclock life in late-stage capitalism with no visible way out. Nihilism sold with a smile. That and a buck-fifty will get you a cup of coffee.

There is probably some truth in that. Garfield is, as we have established, a strip about boredom and banality, and it likely would not be the marketing juggernaut it is (or perhaps was? While still obviously a beloved and ubiquitous franchise, it does not to me seem that it’s quite in the forefront to the degree it’s been at times in the past. Not, of course, that past, present and future distinctions mean all that much to us in our world here) if people didn’t find its characters and situations endlessly relatable. And part of that relatability is the revue of boredom the show puts on for our amusement every day. While we set off to go to work at our own 9-5 jobs, be it as insurance salespeople, secretaries at the branch offices of the local energy grid or self-published authors blogging about progressive media and cultural criticism, Garfield and Friends are doing their jobs too: Adorning themselves with masks and reflecting our lives back to us in pantomime so that we may laugh at ourselves as we laugh along. Like all the great social commentators, performers and spiritual mediators.

There are other strips we could look at that demonstrate this. Today’s is a Sunday strip, and Sunday is traditionally the day of rest. Even people who do nothing for a living need a day off sometimes, and Garfield loves Sundays (although other times he’s said he never gets a day off). But even when we have days off, we still exist in the present moment: No authority came down from On High and granted us agency for a limited time through grace and benevolence. We simply decided that now was the moment we would allow ourselves freedom from the responsibilities we chose to assume to focus on another aspect of our lives. The secret truth is, we always have that agency. So a day off is a day of reflection and contemplation that allows us to evaluate the now we built for us in a different light: A ritualized symbolic metaphor for the constant changes in perspective that our unfolding nows consist of. So for Garfield, and for us, this means reconceptualizing the mundane. Because the mundane is not just mindless grind, so long as we allow ourselves to feel and understand it that way.

Garfield used to joke about being an urbanite at heart a lot, but he’s still a cat, and no matter how much of that domesticus is in the Felis (an invalid taxonomic synonym these days anyway), cats have still never truly been tamed.…

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

The first level this strip works on is a standard joke about Garfield’s ego. We see variations on this joke, just as we see variations on all Garfield‘s jokes, show up infrequently every so often: Jon will make a quip about how the world does not revolve around Garfield (though he is big enough for it to), or that Garfield is not the centre of the universe, which Garfield will either deny or quip back that if he isn’t he should be. Sometimes the roles are reversed, with Garfield opening the strip declaring he’s the centre of the universe, which Jon will then proceed to reject.

The impetus for the joke’s setup comes from actual cat behaviour: Much of Garfield’s personality is derived from taking humans’ observations and interpretations of the things their housecats did and anthropomorphizing them: Cats are vain, cats are aloof, cats only care about me for what they can get from me, they claw things I don’t want them to claw, don’t listen to my commands like my dog does, and so on and so forth. So Garfield asks us to imagine how cats would display this behaviour if they could rationalize like humans do, and then, without missing a beat, turns around and points out the absurdity of its own question. Because for one thing, the joke is, of course, double-edged: Jon may mock Garfield and accuse him of having an inflated ego, but the cat is right. After all, whose name has the title of the comic been given, and who is its central character? The defense rests.

(Indeed, this may literally be the oldest joke in the book: Jim Davis has said that he *was* originally going to call the strip Jon, and just give his star a sarcastic and witty cat as a supporting foil, but his syndicate said the strip simply *had* to be about the cat, because that would make it an instant smash hit. This contradicts some other accepted wisdom about Garfield‘s origin, but it’s funny, and that’s all that matters. Deep time again.)

There are other ways Garfield gets amusingly bleak self-deprecating mileage out of this setup, but that’s for us to explore Another Time. The variation this time has Jon trying to disarm Garfield with an existential quandary, attempting to force him to contemplate his own mortality and impermanence. This is first of all weaksauce, because Garfield is fully aware of that already considering every year he views his birthday with an ominous sense of doom and nihilistic despair, seeing it as one more step towards erasure and nothingness. But Garfield more or less has negative continuity anyway, at least when it comes to characterization and character development, so this is a largely irrelevant counterargument. Instead, let us consider the cosmological appearance of Jon’s thesis.

First of all, returning to our initial reading, the world would not continue to exist without Garfield because Garfield is the world: It’s his mark.…

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With deepest apologies to Chris Stangl, Permanent Saturday is a semiregular critical exploration of Jim Davis’ comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson’s Farm.

In Garfield, the space-time continuum is an arrow that moves from left to right. Movement across comic panels corresponds to movement through both time and space and, while it is often played with, the law itself is inviolate. So Garfield’s physical positioning within the strip itself reinforces the central joke of this strip: With his eyes closed, the cat faces left and declares that he is “contemplating the future”. But because he is facing left he is, in fact, looking into the past. Indeed, as this is the first panel, he’s looking so far into the past it extends into his own prehistoric deep time, as the only thing to the left of the first panel is the first border of the strip itself, the boundary of his own reality. Garfield realises his mistake in panel two: Note how while he’s still facing left, his eyes are now open, and, as this is the second panel, he is explicitly gazing into his own immediate personal history.

(My fellow Alice Aficionados may catch some subtle Looking-Glass motifs here that also tie into the central joke, but while Garfield can and does play with Alice on occasion, I don’t think it’s as pronounced, or really relevant, in this particular instance.)

The unfolding present only becomes the past once we stop to reflect on it (and let’s flag that to return to later). The first punchline, the humourous dissonance and absurdity of a cat who can’t tell the difference between the past and the future, is subsumed and undercut by the winking acknowledgment of the rules and realities of comic strip time. And indeed, without missing a beat, the feline sage delivers a second by confessing that his pasts and futures “look a lot alike”.

The two biggest criticisms of Garfield and Jim Davis’ writing are, curiously enough, the two most mutually incompatible. According to its critics, Garfield is somehow simultaneously a boring, unfunny, patronizing hack job blatantly only written to cynically pander to cat owners and start a merchandising empire that has been this way since day 1 *and* a brilliantly subversive postmodern deconstruction of the comic strip medium that used to be hilarious and cutting edge in the 1980s and early 1990s but stopped being that at some point. Whether this cutoff point is pegged at 1995, 1997, 2000, 2006, 2008 or 2013 tends to change depending on who’s making the argument at any given time, and that there are so many dates given is probably telling. But Jon’s last name is Arbuckle, not Schrödinger, and Garfield can’t be both at once. The strip has outlasted all of its critics and attacks, and is well aware of the reputation it has amongst the comic strip intellegentsia, hence jokes like this one: Garfield’s pasts looks a lot like his futures (and his presence: Note how he’s staring straight ahead, out of the strip and at us, in that last panel) because not much in his world ever changes.…

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