When the funnies aren't so funny anymore, or, The week Garfield died.
As Americans, we have all grown up in some way conscious of the syndicated weekday comic strip, a traditionally lighthearted companion to a hot cup of coffee. It is a form of art that, along with taxidermy, TV voiceovers, & commercial acting, valorizes the product over the producer. While certain syndicated cartoonists have gained cult followings for their art (Bill Watterson, Gary Larson, & Charles Schulz leap to mind, though there are plenty others), for the most part no one cares about who is dishing up that day's strip, so long as it is short & funny. On the flip side, there is the comic artist who draws contempt from his or her audience for repeatedly serving the same stale jokes again & again & again without care for the reader. "Cathy" artist Cathy Guisewite & "Mutts"'s Patrick McDonnell seem to use a formula for their work that dates back to the age of "Marmaduke," & for many, Jim Davis is also one of these cartoonists. For years, I thought Davis deserved this reputation, but then there came the week when he proved everyone wrong.
This was the week before Halloween, 1989, before most of us could read beyond a Dick & Jane level (if at all). Davis' Garfield character was top cat in the comic world, with his signature blend of sarcasm, cynical wit, & hunger. One Monday, however, the casual Garfield reader opened to the strip to discover a very different Garfield than the one they were used to. And suddenly things weren't so funny anymore.
Garfield 10-23
As the week continued, it became very clear that Jim Davis was going beyond not only the realm of Garfield's very constructed cat-world, but beyond the allowed stage of comic humor in general. Tuesday's strip found the lovable character scared & confused:
Garfield 10-24
The scenery looked familiar, but there was a new depth involved (not only of meaning, but of perspective, as well, something that the comic generally did not experiment with). No longer was there humor behind the cynicism. The cynicism was behind the frame of the strip itself, instead, showcasing a darker side of Davis the philosopher & progenitor of time manipulation rather than Davis the humorist. The next day, it only got worse:
Garfield 10-25
Humor became not an effect of confusion, but an effect of discomfort. The reader is displaced & awkward, unsure whether or not this shift in mood is purposeful, & feeling, quite frankly, like a voyeur. On Thursday, a new theme is introduced entirely: that of the imaginary turned very real.
Garfield 10-26
The way Davis has constructed this shows a very aware cartoonist playing with the very idea of syndication, turning it into a vehicle of suspense & bewildered uncertainty rather than just one in which tired jokes become ever more exhausting. Friday's Garfield turned that suspense into a fear of the variety that gets way to close to the reader. Garfield the cat's life no longer becomes a situational comedy on the pages of a newspaper, but is placed instead in a sphere inside of which each reader resides as well.
Garfield 10-27
With the last frame in this strip, the character's needs no longer are typified by his existence as only a character. Beyond the hunger, wit, & cynical attitude, Garfield now is supplied with loneliness, fear, & confusion, all very human emotions, & ones that transcend simply dialogue. The reader gets a sense here that no only is something very different, but that something has been different for a very long time, longer than both the reader & the character perhaps have been aware of in the past. The final strip in the series, printed on Saturday, October 28, 1989, rips the entire imagined world of "Garfield" wide open.
Garfield 10-28
The first frame focuses on Garfield's eye, the supposed pathway to his mind (& some would say soul), with the caption, "After years of taking life for granted, Garfield is shaken by a horrifying vision of the inevitable process called 'time.'" The realization here is not only that Garfield as a character has "taken life for granted," but that the reader of Garfield has taken the intrinsic imagined world of Garfield itself very much for granted, suddenly thrown into a turbulent pool of emotions with a shift of themes, perspective, & situation. "Garfield" no longer is just a strip about a hungry cat; Davis has turned it into a self-situated analysis of the human condition, presenting fear as that which we use to deal with unnerving realizations. The second frame of Saturday's strip throws the entire week into focus, the top half showing the reader yet another human quality possessed by Garfield that we have not seen before: denial. Denial is used as another tool of fear to showcase ways in which one comes to term with unexpected, supposedly undeserved loss. The bottom half of this second frame explains the entire history of Jim Davis' "Garfield" comic by supplying the reader with the immediate, shocking realization that the entire space within the frame within the paper has been constructed in Garfield's mind. Jim & Odie do not exist in a physical sense, & have never existed as such. Garfield's hunger, his wit, & his cynicism are all products of a world in which he does not physically partake. Essentially, we learn that Garfield lives in what would become The Matrix on big screens about 10 years later. The character's denial of reality allow him to create (or, we infer, re-create) physical images of his owner & canine companion rather than face the fact that both have either died or left him alone. The final frame of the strip has Davis using most of the space as a tool of warning, broadcasting a message to the reader that implies poor "conduct" & asks for re-examination. Here, Davis' work of the past week comes dangerously close to propaganda, I feel, but the overarching idea of comics displacing their reader by introducing topically "unfunny" (see also: real) themes stays strong.
I introduce this mostly because I think it works brilliantly as a modern re-telling of the Mickey Mouse comic we looked at in class (the suicide strips), though with a much darker outcome. Here, it seems, Davis is not looking for respect as a syndicated cartoonist, but philosophical interest beyond the ink on the page. He asks for the reader to step outside the realm of complete dichotomy between audience & artist, & step heavily into the liminal space that exists therein. More than "real life" comic strips that use human characters with functions & jobs only humans possess, such as "Mary Worth" or "Rex Morgan MD," or even "Zits" & "Big Nate," Davis' singular week-long "Garfield" strip in October 1989 asks the reader to come away from the comics page with a stronger sense of self-awareness & certainty. Essentially, Jim Davis has required that we bring our own assumptions as readers of comics to the breakfast table only if we are prepared to throw them out the window while we're there.
Comments
Wow...
wow, wow, wow, wow,
Looks like I am gonna have fun reading your thoughts in this class over the semester. I was ld enough to read Garfield at this time, in fact maybe too old for I missed this one. Yet, I was around in the mid-80s when everyone bought Garfield folders and book covers for school, and I have to admit, this strip is haunting. The existential crisis of a cartoon cat, and the frame where the reader sees the house is both condemned and for sale is a wonderful play on perspective in the comic, which is quite cinematic in its quick, wide-shot of the entire reality (or unreality of Garfield's being).
This is a wild post, I can;t believe you are knocking them out like this already, we are not even an entire week in, bravo!
FYI
This is The Reverend, in case you couldn't have guessed, Bradleigh.
I have been dying to write about this strip for years
& I am ecstatic to finally have the medium to do it properly.
This is life-changing stuff right here, if you let it hit you in just the right way. If we think of Garfield as the pop radio of syndicated comics (stale form, rarely original, mass appeal), this series of strips is the "Blister in the Sun" or "Paper Planes." Here we have Davis showing a flash of brilliance &, at the same time, a glimmer of regret towards his own art. This still doesn't explain why Garfield, sucks, though. Maybe someday someone will be able to explain that.
Welcome aboard, Jim.
Interesting
I had no idea... I'd always thought of Garfield as pretty one-dimensional: http://xkcd.com/78/
Oh, and one nit-pick:
Curiouser and Curiouser
I wonder if Munroe is aware of the above Garfield strip, or if it was luck of the draw that chose Garfield over Cathy or the other aforementioned joke recyclers. Curious to contemplate what knowledge or ignorance of the '89 strips existence implies about the xkcd comic. (I was going to post that xkcd strip, it makes me happy that someone beat me to it!)
Check out Breathed
Berkeley Breathed did a lot of this kind of stuff with Bloom County and its offshoots. Check him out if you don't know his work.
Garfield and Existential Crises
This is a great post, and an excellent example of the kind of analysis I want us to bring to the comic page. One of your most important insights, though, is made as an aside:
Not only is this sequence thematically odd for "Garfield," it is artistically experimental as well. By introducing an actual vanishing point perspective, Davis is putting Garfield in a virtual 3D plane that, like the introduction of "reality shaped" panels in "Vacation Time", frames a scenario in which the survival rules are not as cartoony as normal. In practical terms, this kind of move renegotiates the readers' relationship to the narrative diegesis of the story.
It's also interesting, in light of redheadedsnippet's post on color, that the version you provide here is colorized. Whenever I've seen this sequence before, it's been solid black and white, which I think gave it a more Kafkaesque feel. Have you seen it in that version as well?
The break at the end is, I think, the strangest part of it all. Not only does the narrator break the diegetic frame (which is kind of appropriate since this whole series is about framing), he deigns to lecture us about our imaginations. The strip is, at this point, already heavily metafictional, so the direct address from the narrator seems like overkill to me. I'm sure he felt that the work demanded some explanation, but I'm sure this answer still left some regular readers perplexed.
Also, I like your title because it suggests something that hadn't occurred to me before: what if this strip is actually canonical and the rest of the Garfield run is really Garfield's undeath? I mean, the repetitious and contrived gags have a certain sysiphusian monotony about them, and thinking of Garfield as an indifferent shade doesn't seem too far off.
Finally, I just want to mention that a Garfield Halloween cartoon scared the hell out of me when I was a kid; I guess I would have seen it a little before this strip series came out. I remember not really "getting" Garfield, so I didn't care much about him as a character. But there's this part where Garfield and Odie are hiding in a cupboard and the pirate ghosts suddenly throw open the door. As far as I'm concerned, that ranks right up there with Large Marge in the freaking-out-little-kids department.
A terrible comic loses itself for once.
"Losing itself" meaning here that it forms a scope much larger than that which it existed within for so long. Your commentary is spot-on about so many things (Pee-Wee especially), but never is it so pointed than when you elaborate on the expansion of the entire metacritical universe in which Garfield exists. To be more specific, you say:
This is PRECISELY what I think this series of strips was created to accomplish. If we take this week of "Garfield" as the fulcrum on which the entire history of its character's lives rest, we can consider it to be that which every frame of "Garfield" not a part of this series can be compared. Suddenly, the characters within the strip have an implied history, & one that is uncharacteristically philosophical, & humanly (some would argue) unthinkable. This is where the genius lies: Davis, in creating this specific series, is not only poking fun at cartoon syndication, but is tossing the entire idea headlong into an extremely existential argument, which is this -- why are these characters here, & who are we to have ever created them? And, perhaps more importantly so, does their existence hinge on our artistic rendering of them?
Having read this series from '89 over & over again, it becomes more & more obvious that every other "Garfield" is a constructed, patented lie that exists solely in an imagined space. But...the more you consider this...the more clear it becomes that this is a basic assumption that we as readers make about EVERY comic we read before we even begin to read them! Davis simply pointing it out, flipping it inside-out, & rubbing it in the reader's face.
& also: this is the first time I had come across it in color, as well, though I actually think the color version manages more visual depth & implied meaning, as well (with frames like the close-up of Garfield's eye, which I consider to be the coolest frame of the whole week).
Is Garfield imaginary?
I would recommend checking out Garfield Minus Garfield. It adds a couple of levels to the Garfield we've all come to know, precisely by removing him from the comics and letting Jon stand on his own (as best he can, at any rate). I find it to be a welcome change of pace. This one is my favorite so far.