Sunday, October 01, 2006

Cat Scratch Fever


Title Panel: Normally a non sequitur opportunity to place Garfield and his name in unfamiliar context for no reason, today the title panel takes advantage of the forum's allowance of exaggerated artwork to create an impressionistic emblem of the character's key passions for food, sleep, and outrageous laziness. The drawing is stretched and grotesque enough that only by familiarity with Garfield iconography we even recognize what we're looking at. It is an image of comical concentration that could have run by itself as a daily strip.

Garfield: With just as much exertion of his arm muscle, could have scratched his own back. Or he could have done what other cats do, and curled up in Jon's lap for a petting. But achieving simple goals through psychological gamesmanship is a Garfield habit, and most of the time proving his manipulation skills seems to mean more than taking pleasure in the desired result. There are times in life when enjoying the journey over the destination is healthy and meditative. This is not one of them.

Jon: Jon has a great series of takes in the bottom row, in which he thinks he has Garfield's hand-signal game figured out, then for some reason starts really getting into it, and ends with an Arbuckle slow-burn... as he continues scratching Garfield's back. There are few things in human psychology more hilarious to behold than someone confidently plowing forward when we know he is clueless, and a man trudging forward through an activity he hates as he complains about doing it.

4 comments:

becca jo said...

i'm totally going to try that. thanks garfield!

Anonymous said...

At least he's sort of acting like a real cat, with the desire for scratching. Real cats can't dp it themselves. And they can get really annoying and pushy when they want to be scratched.

Emery Cat Scratcher said...

Using Garfield and his mannerisms can be transposed to one's own cat and their habits including scratching and eating. Thanks for this informative post.

Nyperold said...

If that's grotesque, then I wonder what you'd call this.