Jon has a plan to make Garfield feel bad about himself, and he wants you to be a part of it! There's usually a reason Garfield breaks the 4th wall. Today that reason is to make sure you know where the green shirt came from. Imagine how freaked-out you'd be if the shirt suddenly materialized on Garfield's body.
The punchline, of course, is not that Garfield is semi-literate, because we witness his reading abilities all the time. No, our pudgy hero is having what may be termed "hysterical illiteracy", a condition hitherto unknown in the annals of medicine. Hitherto unseen in the annals of fashion is the LAZY shirt, which Jon must have made himself. While Old Navy will happily supply those children of roughly Garfield's figure with shirts reading FLIRT and CHICK MAGNET, nothing so brutally honest will grace the torsos of our youth. Why does America love Garfield, when he exists to remind them of their worst foibles and tragedy of their alienation? Answer: We hate ourselves!
Special thanks to the God-among-sarcastic-comics blogs, Comics Curmudgeon for linking to us (me?). May the heavens rain lasagna upon Josh... even though he doesn't like Garfield and is rude about it all the time.
7 comments:
The shirt must have been specially made to be cat size, yet it looks like it could also fit Jon. I think I'll just stop trying to understand how the universe of Garfield works. It's making my brain melt.
The text is the balloon is wrong. It shouldn't just be upside down but also backwards.
wow, you're brilliant. found you from a metafilter link. thank you for simultaneously rekindling and shattering some precious childhood memories for me. this is on my permanent favorites list now.
I wonder if Garfield's been lobotomized . . . really, what kind of cat lets you put a t-shirt on him, then just leaves it on?
"what kind of cat lets you put a t-shirt on him, then just leaves it on?"
One who IS "yzal"
And it wasn't even necessary. The first panel could have simply been him walking to the right, shirt in hand, and that would have conveyed the same information, without him saying a word or even looking at us.
Okay, one bit of information would have been lost: The characters themselves feel the need to break the fourth wall every once in a while whether doing so tells us anything else or not.
Tume for the mualing to begin
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