What The Internet Did To Garfield

October 31, 2022 8:41 PM

From Super Eyepatch Wolf, who brought us What The Internet Did To Undertale (previously), comes What The Internet Did To Garfield [1h20m]. You can decide -- do you remain innocent, or do you watch a movie length video essay that will utterly change, destroy, and rebuild how you view this most basic of comic strips?
posted by hippybear (28 comments total)

If I'm spending an hour on one Garfield strip, it's going to be through this video again.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:53 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

I can't watch this tonight so someone let me know if Garkov shows up
posted by cortex at 8:54 PM on October 31, 2022 [3 favorites]

There is an xkcd for everything.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:52 PM on October 31, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm obsessed with weird Internet Garfield and I don't know why. I assume I am about to learn. Thank you!
posted by braksandwich at 1:32 AM on November 1, 2022

I love this video (and was contemplating making a post about it here, but I got distracted before I could actually do so - so, thanks for the post!)
posted by Jeanne at 4:39 AM on November 1, 2022

When I was a kid I liked Garfield! I still mostly like Garfield! Most of what people complain about Garfield now is just meme culture, people getting convinced after the fact by all the many clamoring voices they hear. The early Garfield books were all big best sellers, and someone had to have bought them.

The like that Garfield was created to be marketable is a lie. Have you ever seen the first Garfield strips? That is not the look of a character designed to sell plush toys. Jim Davis got into cartooning as an assistant on Tumbleweeds, which had a very distinctive, but not at all cute, look, and that seems to have influenced a bit of early Garfield.

It's not the very best comic strip, or the funniest, and it doesn't have a big point to it. It's just an inoffensive comic strip, originally meant to be a delivery mechanism for jokes regarding cats. That's all. That's a small field to plow for an indefinite number of jokes, so over time it expanded to include dumb dogs, hapless owners, obnoxious kittens, and other things.

And, while it's not the best newspaper comic, it's definitely better than average. When your competition is the likes of modern Blondie, it's not hard to excel, but there is almost always the kernel of a good joke in a Garfield strip.

(If you want a great comic strip? Adam Koford's Haircut Practice, which is parody of, homage to, and like a continuation of Peanuts. Another, that's sadly ended due to the death of its creator? Richard Thompson's Cul De Sac.)
posted by JHarris at 4:46 AM on November 1, 2022 [15 favorites]

Garfield and Friends was my favorite cartoon growing up. It had all the subversiveness and intelligent writing of Animaniacs (thanks Mark Evanier!) but was much subtler, less manic, and slyly contained within a brand that no one would assume could be anything but bland. It was my Rocky and Bullwinkle.

And Garfield is and always has been a commercial platform for getting crap past the radar. Remember that Garfield: His Nine Lives television special? "Diana's Piano" still brings me to tears just thinking about it, and the less that's said about "Lab Animal" the better because I'm still in therapy. Even something as cartoonish as "King Cat" has an overwhelming bleakness and fatalism that renders it unwatchable after the first viewing.

Is it any coincidence that the Internet has latched onto Garfield instead of Heathcliff?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:36 AM on November 1, 2022 [8 favorites]

I didn't watch the 9 lives show, but I did read the book, which was something unexpected. It says something that we have both "Garfield without Garfield" and Garfield as eldritch horror. What, I don't know.
posted by Spike Glee at 5:45 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also, who else remembers when in addition to eating lasagna and complaining about Mondays, Garfield's catchphrase was "people who do X should be drug out into the street and shot"?

Yeah

I'll cut Randall some slack because it was such an early strip, I kind of think this is one of those rare instances where the XKCD strip is wrong. Jim Davis has always been messing with us. We just weren't paying attention.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 5:45 AM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

Speaking of Heathcliff, I don't know if the comic had always been this way but it's a mutated dadaist freak lost in its own self-reference and each panel seems to be missing the setup or the punchline or both. It's actually pretty funny how wtf unfunny it is. The most absurd strips are highlighted on this Twitter account (for as long as Twitter is still a thing).
posted by AlSweigart at 5:48 AM on November 1, 2022 [6 favorites]

I had a copy of the His Nine Lives book as a kid, and I mostly liked it, but one of them made me want to burst into tears. The one where the cat attacks his elderly owner? I couldn't even open the book to those pages. I didn't know there was an animated special until roughly now.

Recently, Kevin Perjurer did an hour-long special on the Old Mill at the Kennywood theme park in Pennsylvania, the prototype of the "tunnel of love" type ride for mid-century smooching. Eventually it got dilapidated and needed a new theme, and so the theme park turned to ... Jim Davis. He'd had a plan for a Garfield theme park that never got off the ground, so all that energy went into making a haunted Garfield dark ride. It ran for many years and was extremely cursed, but it sure made some memories.

Despite the topic, it's actually a very sweet video because so many people wrote in, and: Look I can’t think of another way to say this, a lot of you were gay in the Garfield dark ride.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:28 AM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

The Internet didn't make Jon drink... that. He did it on his own.
posted by delfin at 6:48 AM on November 1, 2022 [3 favorites]

There is an xkcd for everything.


There is. But asking Jim Davis to throw off his commercial shackles just shows you don't know anything about the guy.

Jim Davis decided to give his depressed rust-belt hometown a revenue source. For his home town, he put on those shackles and let the whole world think that he's just a repetitive hack.
posted by ocschwar at 7:20 AM on November 1, 2022 [5 favorites]

The like that Garfield was created to be marketable is a lie.

No, it's the truth:

In 1973, while working as an assistant for T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds, he created the comic strip Gnorm Gnat, which ran only in the Pendleton Times of Pendleton, Indiana, from 1973 to 1975 and met with little success. Davis had tried to syndicate the strip, but was unsuccessful; he noted that one editor told him that his "art was good, his gags were great, [but] nobody can identify with bugs." Davis decided to peruse current comic strips to determine what species of animal characters might be more popular. He felt that dogs were doing well, but noticed no prominent cats. Davis figured he could create a cat star, having grown up on a farm with twenty-five cats. Thus was created the character of Garfield.

Davis has always been very upfront about the commercial nature of Garfield. In a way, he has the bizarro version of the integrity of Bill Watterson: Watterson would never sacrifice his artistic vision for money, Davis never pretended to have an artistic vision and is happy to take money for anything.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:01 AM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

Davis never pretended to have an artistic vision and is happy to take money for anything

Like the Mr. Potato Head comic! Which I actually liked as a kid—haven't re-read my book to see whether it holds up (largely because I'm worried it won't). Still unclear to me how much Davis was paid by Hasbro for that project.
posted by the tartare yolk at 8:24 AM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Never mind Garfield. If you want pure surrealism in newspaper comic form, nothing beats modern Heathcliff on most days:

Just a couple recent examples to demonstrate !
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:49 AM on November 1, 2022 [4 favorites]

In 1973, while working as an assistant for T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds...

There is a part of this story missing which is brought to the fore in the video, which the video author uses to great effect to underscore one of his main points.
posted by hippybear at 8:57 AM on November 1, 2022

Super Eyepatch Wolf. Hmm, that name sounds familiar.
posted by Stoneshop at 10:24 AM on November 1, 2022

....Y'all, when I said that there was an xkcd for everything, that didn't necessarily mean that I AGREED with it.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:15 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also, we're remiss to have a thread about the Internet and Garfield without mentioning Izzzyzzz's fantastic videos on The Garfield Iceberg and GarfieldEATS.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:47 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

>>The like that Garfield was created to be marketable is a lie.
>No, it's the truth:

I gave my reason for saying it above: early Garfield was pretty ugly, and sharpened up a lot in the first months. The quote star gentle uterus presents says it was designed to be commercial, but that's not the same sense as being marketable? From context I see "commercial" as meaning, might succeed in the difficult-to-crack syndicated comic strip market, where lots of strips fail in their opening months. Making a comic strip about a cat is a good choice--people like cats. "Marketable" means, to my eyes, designed to be turned into plush toys and car suction-cup clingers and put on happy meal glasses and so on. I've seen people speculate on that before, and I don't think it's accurate.

Also: the internet is full of people disparaging Jim Davis. There is really nothing wrong with him. He made an really popular comic strip, and that is all. I have never seen anything to suggest there is any evil in his soul. He's not a Machiavellian puppeteer of culture. He's a guy who was in the right place at the right time. He basically won the lottery. He did merchandise his character to hell and back, it is true, but for all his money is pretty chill with it? He hasn't bought any a big social media companies, to pick a topical example of obnoxious richness, at least.
posted by JHarris at 2:12 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah. Bill Watterson never let commercialization get in the way of his artistic vision, and Jim Davis never let his artistic vision get in the way of commercialization and they're both really cool people because of their differing perspectives.

Davis may have licensed the crap out of Garfield, but he's always been pretty chill about people taking Garfield in new directions that he may not have originally thought of: i.e. the officially licensed Garfield Minus Garfield book, and I don't think he's been very overly protective when it comes to sending takedown notices? (Maybe that might change now that PAWS Inc has been sold to Viacom....)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:46 PM on November 1, 2022 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: This will become horrifyingly relevant later.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

This will become horrifyingly relevant later.

Oh good! Someone else is actually watching the video!
posted by hippybear at 3:46 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Garfield spent the 90s partying all night in German discotheques while maintaining a family-friendly image. It’s a remarkable, really.
posted by Headfullofair at 3:48 PM on November 1, 2022

Garfield and I are the same age; there has never not been Garfield. I hesitate to say I may have read more Garfield comic strips by the time I was in high school than the author of this video did for his research. That being said, his research and conclusions seem solid to me. May we never speak of this again.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 6:11 PM on November 1, 2022 [1 favorite]

Garfield used to be awesome - and my kids like the new cartoon, but he's too actiony for me. I prefer lazy Garfield.

If you haven't seen Garfield's Halloween Special, you should see it. Funny, cruel, moderately scary for a kids cartoon, and then heartwarming.

Garfield - Halloween Special

The Christmas and Thanksgiving Specials are worth watching too.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:59 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Garfield, you say? Interesting...
posted by Thorzdad at 4:59 PM on November 13, 2022 [1 favorite]