Cat, Cook and Candle

It is impossible to admonish, throw hints at, or guilt trip someone who is behaving rudely on purpose. A cat does not sit on your newspaper because he is confused; he sits there because he knows you are reading and wants attention. Here, Garfield fully understands that he is disrupting Jon's romantic intent, snubbing Liz, and willfully disregarding Jon's forceful hint — refuting it, even, as the man implies that any company would be a third wheel, and the cat deflects the insinuation by pretending it was addressed elsewhere.

Now, as to the Garf's motivation, it is possible that he is asserting his household dominance and demonstrating his primacy to Jon and over Liz. As the devil is a lawyer whose favorite phrase is "well, technically...," Garfield inserts himself into the conversation just in time to assign himself a spot in Jon's vague personal pronoun. If Jon wants the company of One, that should, can, and will only mean Garfield.

On the other paw, this is about the food, and if only two diners will be eating in style tonight, Garfield is determined, assumes, or knows he is taking up one of those reservations.

Some These Pizzas I'll Be Gone

p1. There's a subtle violation of cartooning conventional wisdom in the first panel. Time flows in a fluid, dynamic manner through comics panels when they don't depict a moment of frozen temporality; i.e.- any time you're reading dialogue, time is passing in the panel. The period depicted in the first panel spans the time it takes for the doorbell to ring, Garfield to physically react, and Jon and Liz to have their exchange. This time-crammed panel isn't unusual, but the left-to-right reading rules of the Western world usually demand that the incidents unspool in an organized fashion that mimics our reading flow - left to right, or top to bottom - so that the causality is clear. The typical way to lay out the panel would be with the eighth note / DING DONG on the left, or hovering above the reactants. The front door is more often than not to the right of the kitchen and dining room, but the geography of Jon's house is malleable, so the action could easily be staged with the cast reacting to a doorbell off left. The solution may not be a Scott McCloud approved method of seamlessly depicting time-passage, but isn't entirely a botch-job. Because the huge sound effect takes up 1/6 of the panel with jaunty lettering, it is likely to draw the eye before the dialogue, and before we begin studying the characters who we've seen in these poses roughly 10 bazillion times.

p2. Panel 1 is going through such layout tortures to preserve a left-to-right line of action, because it has to extend the imaginary stage into off-panel space. The fast/slow area dynamic is being played with, as our eyes push through left/right, only to find static images of people and cats standing around (slow area), with their attention and eyelines focused on off-panel action to the right. The gag is that the pizza delivery person is fleeing Garfield, presumably running and screaming (fast area): the structure of the joke, of the strip, of the composition (even the house's siding is angled to slide us along the path) tug our eyes continually right, playing with the reality of how we physically read Garfield. The strip simulates the urgency of the delivery person running away, even while remaining glued to the spot to watch Garfield and Liz's reactions. The imagination fills the voided image of the delivery person and the flight from Garfield. The joke doesn't hinge on that terror, but on Garfield's nonchalance and Liz's natural surprise and shift to understanding: this happens all the time.

p3. The dust eddying back in Garfield's face is the last element of a sure hand using eloquent cartooning shorthand to build a story in which the action takes place in imaginary space, centering on a character we never see.

The punchline, however, doesn't make a terrible lot of sense, because "customer appreciation" normally means a show of appreciation for customers, not, as Garfield has it, an overzealous appreciation by the customer.

In other news, winter is apparently over in Indiana, and the shrubbery have returned in bushy green force. For the Lizes of the world, this may signal Short-Sleeved Sweater season, but our fashionable readers are advised never to wear such a garment, even in unseasonably warm weather.

The Naked and the Vet

Oh, weird. Sometimes in Garfield the Joke Logic gets so thick it's hard to tell if the gag is being mangled by the rules and realities of the strip, or if the writing is playing with the conventions of the same.

Panel 1: Liz, a professional who works with animals, tries to win a cat over not with treats, petting, or attention, but diplomatic conversation as if he were a respected equal. She is not without a history of speaking to Garfield, but it is usually to threaten him about holding still for shots, or as an ironic confidant for sarcastic remarks about Jon; the excuse for most other instances has been that she's talking to Garfield "as if" he understood, knowing that he does not.

Panel 2: Whether she pulled Garfield aside when Jon stepped out to the bathroom, or she has requested a moment alone with Garfield to have this important talk, the situation is so creepy, it's no wonder Garfield is frozen in disbelief and fright before discussion starts. Liz also doesn't have Jon's ability to hold naturalistic one-sided conversations with Garfield that make sense: as far as Dr. Wilson is concerned, she and Garfield spend the remainder of the strip standing there staring at each other.

Panel 3: Here's where I'm positive the Joke Logic is the joke itself; Garfield's discomfort is crazy, out of character, and silly on many levels. Not the least of which is that everyone sees him naked all the time. Not the least of which is that friends may see each other naked under all sorts of circumstances. Also-not the least of which is that Garfield's lament is supposed to parallel an uncomfortable turn in the doctor-patient relationship, but he doesn't disrobe before or share any personal information with the vet. Aw. He thinks he's people! And so the way a simple joke has confused itself becomes the joke itself.