A Nerd in the Door

In every world except Garfield's, automatic doors have sensors to protect people from being smashed in their mighty jaws. In Jon's double-barreled dumb-move, he not only managed to injure himself in an impossible way, but wants to twist the focus into a joke about our horrible relationship with technology. It's not that joke. It's a story about Jon's good intentions being squashed under the weight of his zealousness. It's about unnecessary, overwhelming desire to please others, and being thwarted by your own stupidity and inabilities. Jon feels on some sublimated level that his chivalrous intentions are a positive trait, and refuses to acknowledge that the automatic doors of the Garfield world are telling him otherwise.

Garfield, meanwhile, has concocted a coping strategy that leaves his arm unwrenched and ego unbruised: he doesn't try to impress anyone, and pretends he doesn't care about them.

A Windsor Knot in the Door

If the Date With Ellen plot was Garfield on story-overload, this week is shaping up to whittling the art and storytelling down to the barest elements. The table long ago reduced to a single horizon line, any unnecessary background detail eliminated, and increasingly, Garfield's foil does not even share space with him. Also more and more Garfield, who used to stand on the table more frequently, sits at the table, removing his lower half from the panel. The funny sight gags, and eye-pleasing rounded artwork is an underappreciated key to Garfield's success, but these gags are such an interesting experiment I wouldn't mind seeing a few strips with no characters in the panel at all.

Today and yesterday's sound-based jokes are a throwback to radio plays in that dialogue and sound effects alone form coherent stories. In other ways, since the reader does not actually hear the indicated noises, but mentally forms them from the onomatopoeia provided, they are like reading short anecdotal jokes in text form. However, the real power of these strips is a technique available specifically to comics.

The backwards logic behind the framing of the scene is not to aim the viewer's eye at the narrative, but to stubbornly leave the visual landscape exactly the same: the mise-en-scène necessarily includes whomever is sitting at the table because it always does. That nothing is so impossible to draw or outlandish to depict in this plot that it could not have been portrayed in pictures, and Garfield's remark that Jon has made "an entrance" would all ratiocinate a staging of the action within the visual space. Instead, we are given only a large amount of blank space and a bored character whose gaze is focused on the invisible space being denied us. The joke is less that Jon has asphyxiated himself by getting his tie caught in the door, than that the natural tendencies of the medium and desires of the audience are being subverted. A cat sitting alone in an empty room has never been so perverse.

The Needle and the Damaged Jon

Some days the table is next to the kitchen. Some days this means Jon must be doing needlepoint in the kitchen, or at the other end of the table. I like these joke constructions because they force sense out of two non sequitur panels and encourage reexamination of the strip. The staging is perfect for Garfield because it rings a mental image of plot, movement, human drama and comedy out of a motionless, nonplussed cat at a table with absolutely no on-panel action.

Jon's recent and chaste-even-for-Garfield makeout session with Liz has encouraged one of his most self-destructive and endearing personality traits. The small pleasures he is deriving from needlepoint (or stalking Liz, or phoning Ellen, or being friends with Garfield or waking up in the morning) must outweigh the agony of having his flesh pierced, because he just keeps doing it. Do you find Jon's idiotic perseverance in the face of adversity admirable? Pathetic? It doesn't matter: you better find it funny, because it is the truth about you, too.

Garfield today continues an ambitious tradition of audio-based gags in an essentially silent medium. I like the Todd Klein-esque tortured stem on the word balloon for Jon's cry of pain. A less exaggerated version attaches the singing balloons to Jon's mouth, which either indicates he is singing off-key, or his singing is becoming more forced and anguished as he "la la la"s grimly through the blood and pain.