Video-Watching Dog

Title Panel: In the spirit of radical, twisted Garfield self-referentiality, investigate the obnoxious/ funny Bean Me! non-game on the official website. Yours truly chugs enough coffee every day to kill a tabby several times over, and few graphical representations of the queasy ecstasy of caffeine jitters have achieved the subjective accuracy as Garfield.

Since You Asked: A lot of readers left comments or e-mailed, specifically asking for either explanation of the joke or... well, mostly people are just baffled by the joke. Not to boast (as I regularly misread or can't figure out Garfield gags), but I thought it was pretty clear, though that is bolstered by familiarity with Garfield gag techniques. It's a patented Inexplicable Behavior Explained by Last Panel Reveal strip.

The Plot: Jon and Garfield look increasingly anxious. Eventually their frenzy peaks, and they run screaming from the room. Odie sleeps calmly through the outburst, and in the end, reveals the TV remote control, secreted under his body. It seems Jon and Garfield were driven to the brink of madness because they could not find the remote. With his newfound power to choose stations, Odie selects a program about a dog waving at the camera.

The question of when a mini-TV was put on The Table remains unanswered.

Man and His Machines: Odie dupes his intellectual superiors by striking at their cultural Achilles heel. The readership may find it fair or unfair, but television in Garfield is always depicted as idiotic and intellectually corrupting. Today, being deprived of this commodity of idiocy causes panic and eventual degeneration into helpless, preverbal animalistic frenzy. There are any number of icons of sustenance Odie could withhold from the Garfield cast, to cause such a meltdown. Garfield without coffee, Pooky or lasagna or Jon with a locked sock drawer might react the same way, but it is telling that the stupidest character achieves power over the others by mastery over their stupidest addiction.

So pervasive is Odie's conquest that he summons programs that do not seem to otherwise exist, and he has made Jon and Garfield forget that the main, full-size television is still available for use in the living room, and probably uses an entirely different remote control.

Kitty in the Water

Title panel: This dire possible-Phantom Menace-reference image sort of summates an idea intrinsic to Garfield, unlike most Sunday title panels, which normally have nothing to do with anything. Garfield confidently moves in on his prey with a combination of cat-like hunting skill, human-learned traits, both of which he is abusing: snorklers are not supposed to murder the fish they observe. While he takes visible satisfaction in this, the cosmos are going to collect a hefty fine from the meek and the mean alike. The idea actually plays out in today's strip, too.

Panel 1: Cats have little narrow tongues. While I appreciate Mr. Davis' ongoing effort to demolish standards of feline anatomy at every turn, his depiction of Garfield's tongue always grosses me out a little.

Panel 5: The Garfieldian version of cause and effect has little to do with karma, or swift justice, or even a universal morality meting out punishment and reward in a pattern the characters can understand. But perhaps we can discern a kind of fatalistic irony anyway. What has Garfield done "wrong" today? He fails to look before leaping, literally not checking the wading pool for water. He seeks to sully a neighbor's property -- in Judeo-Christian terms, we might say he is "stealing" -- without second thought. Overcome with excitement, he showboats with an overzealous leap, boastful and prideful. But those are normal, petty sins that in the laws of Garfield's universe are not as funny to punish as the self-satisfaction of someone who thinks they have it all figured out.

Buster Keaton's physics often worked on a similar principle: dumb luck will save your life, but any plans will be demolished in the process. Garfield supposes you might also smash your face into a tree. The difference between this lesson and a Chuck Jones Roadrunner cartoon, is that there is nothing harebrained or elaborate about jumping into a swimming pool. The margin for error is small enough, the scene mundane enough, that only Garfield would see it as an opportunity for punishing a character so harshly.

Panel 6: Here was a chance to reward Odie by having him splashed with a pool full of water, or indicating that he is granted some relief by the shade of the pool on his head. No: he just gets a pool on his head.

Also: Garfield jumped into the pool so hard he reversed the color scheme? Bravo.

Dog Drool Afternoon

The basic dynamic: Odie's expression of unconditional love is overzealous and physically repulsive, and inspires not appreciation but misery. In the Garfield-verse, counting on others for happiness is an unwise proposition, and moments of joy tend to be born from self-reliance and/or self-indulgence. Total obliviousness to others' feelings is a partial explanation of Odie's happiness; ignorance may be bliss, to a degree, but it also gets him put out of the house and branded as an outcast. The other part is simply rushing headlong into what he wants to do. Lest we think Garfield endorses this kamikaze happiness as a successful coping mechanism, note that there is no character as put-upon, loathed or physically abused as Odie. Closer to the truth is that Garfield tells us it's unnatural and stupid to be so optimistic, and in episodes like today's, it is disgusting as well.

Point of consideration: Odie's primary job is foil to Garfield, perpetual optimist to the pessimistic cat. But another aspect of Odie's character is a distilled mirror-version of Jon, specifically Jon's approach to dating; Arbuckle throws himself at women with supreme confidence.

A Note on Cartooning: One of the strip's specialties is suppressing the moment of physical comedy. This is certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, but Davis frequently opts to portray those panels of aftermath, or focus on a character's reaction to off-panel action. Today the scenes of Odie's tongue actually making contact with others are hidden behind sound-effects so large they blot out the action. Add to list of What's Awesome About Garfield: it solves story problems and invents joke structures with techniques specific to the medium, without drawing attention away from the jokes the innovations are supposed to service.

What better panel to advertise the Garfield goodies available via cellular phone, than the image of two angry, miserable characters quietly seething and dripping with saliva? Probably none but the first panel proper, in which Garfield stands motionless and staring into space.

BIDDITTY

Oh boy, folks, looks like Garfield's world has changed forever! He's... sleeping.

The ill-chosen colors of wall and tablecloth today have created the temporary illusion that Odie and Garfield are sleeping on the lawn. They still may be, but "outside" is usually indicated by grass blades and/or a swirly shape representing the sun.

I guess the joke is supposed to be that Garfield fell asleep too close to Odie's butt and got kicked in the face. There's a second level in which Odie's Dream Garfield Avatar inadvertently screws over his real-life counterpart. In Garfield the wish your heart makes is to punt someone in the skull: our great aspiration is to kick a man when he's down. Even the Dream-field in the final two panels indicates with his devilish expression that he knows the seemingly innocuous act of throwing a ball he found, that someone, somewhere, even on another plane of consciousness, is getting screwed over. And it makes him happy.

Title Panel: I'm probably the only person in the world who is concerned that the creepy title panel resembles John Lennon's cartoon contribution to the early queer anthology The Gay Liberation Book. It showed a guy in a turban riding a flying carpet and enthusiastically masturbating.

Kick Me Beneath the Milky Twilight

Criticism: I usually try to ignore it unless making a joke about it, but... The computer color job on today's strip is atrocious, distracting, and doesn't make sense. It's a simple, reasonably funny gag confused by some kind of spotlight (?) at frame right that looks like it should have something to do with the action but does not. As a light source, it's badly rendered (explain the shading in row 2 panel 2?), and besides, Garfield isn't normally drawn with deep shadows unless there's a reason.

Praise: Today's Garfield combines a solid character joke and a typically cynical assessment of our role in the universe. In the first, Odie is so used to being physically abused that it is the only way he makes sense of his existence, and will hurt himself if Garfield is not there to do it... The dog equivalent of a cutter, I guess. In the second, Garfield is punished for not accepting his eternal job as Odie's designated abuser. If Garfield had taken his preordained place on the table top and kicked an innocent dog, instead of being on the floor, he would never be crushed by the punishing will of the cosmos. If it's in the cards for you to physically injure animals, Garfield urges you to rush to your work with open arms.

Insightful Observation: Odie looks more and more like Super Mario's dinosaur friend Yoshi.

Give My Umbrella to the Rain Dogs

For the non-pros in the audience, the top tier of a Sunday comic strip is frequently hacked off by newspaper editors for space-saving purposes or reasons of simple comics-hating orneriness. Thus do cartoonists either use the top panels for a throwaway gag or expendable exposition. Today Mr. Davis uses the top tier to present his traditional cleverly-customized Garfield title logo, followed by... the first panel repeated twice.

Right? WRONG! The raindrops and landscape behind our favorite mutt change enough to register to the naked eye, but Odie, too, has been re-drawn. Attempts (via Photoshop's powerful layer-opacity tools) to line-up the two drawings of Odie prove they are two separate pieces of art, though admittedly drawn with startling mechanical precision.

Again this week, Davis isn't interested in using the Sunday format to provide more content per se, but to take advantage of the sheer space available. The pacing of this gag is about how long it takes for very little to happen... and when something does happen, it's someone going the extra mile to wrong you specifically and intentionally... which is kind of a Garfield life-lesson in general.

Q's (A's not forthcoming)
Why is Garfield so very happy to see Odie in that penultimate panel?
Is Jon concerned that his pets have escaped to an enormous empty field?
... or is this some kind of existential metaphor?
Why is Garfield so very happy to be locked in a newspaper vending machine?
If I turn the title-panel picture on its side to make sense of the drawing, then the word "Garfield" is sideways. I guess that last one's not a question.