Cat Fight

Garfield is a bully; all trickster characters who achieve special mastery over their universe (Bugs Bunny, Axel Foley, Brer Rabbit, etc.) press their intellectual advantages to some degree, and could technically be charged with emotional and mental bullying. But Garfield regularly physically assaults Jon, Odie, Nermal, spiders, mailmen and others when manipulation fails or is just too taxing for his liking. This is one of the qualities -- if not the quality -- that makes Garfield a uniquely and specifically American pop culture icon, and is the source of a lot of his power as an instrument of social criticism.

On one hand, we have the small, bitter ironies of a self-fulfilling prophecy: both the dog's sign (which in part inspires the cat to retaliate), and Garfield's threat (a cruel response to accusations of cruelty) elicit exactly the reply they were intended to avoid. The supreme comic contradiction of Garfield is his utter narcissism despite failing to manifest many positive characteristics. The masterstroke, as in Confederacy of Dunces, is to position the ill-tempered slob as the hero, by placing him in a world so screwed-up that his stubborn egoism looks like integrity. Whether that little gay dog takes the sign down or not (and who made that sign for him?), Garfield, ever a credit to his race, is going to pound the bejeezus out of him anyway.

Sit, Odie, Sit. Good Dog.

It is not ours to question the comic strip reality of a cat who has built scale versions of restaurant waiting line placards, nor of a dog who takes commands in written form, nor of that dog's anatomy which is so tortured that it is difficult to recognize at a glance that he is indeed sitting in the third panel. Joke Logic or no, it's a little counterintuitive that a restaurant-protocol gag should take place on top of a table in the house.

That Odie can read is pretty much the crux of the joke, because the associative gap between the meaning of "wait to be seated" and the command for a dog to sit is not very large. There's a second shade of meaning, in which Odie is so dumb he must be ordered both not to sit and to sit. Lord knows what he'd do if given no commands. Squat, maybe? Funnier is how Garfield shuffles through panel two, disinterested, though he is surely the one who made the signs. There are a few levels to these presentational strips in which Odie and Garfield mime a broad joke for us in vaudeville style. We are treated to the joke itself, the acknowledged artificiality of the format, and the self-conscious performances of our silent clowns: Odie with full confidence of the antique material, a happy, catatonic Fatty Arbuckle, and Garfield a weary Buster Keaton, stone-faced with disgust or defeat. The idea of an entertainer so lazy he doesn't care about the audience is a masterstroke. Your comedian is indifferent: laughing is your own job.

Flight of the Ph-odie-nix

Scott McCloud, eat your heart out. Garfield makes deconstructionist jokes about the relationships of time, sound, and image in comics, and links them to the historical model of silent film, with an eye to the special problems of the slapstick genre.

The Garfield staff researchers would have done well, however, to note the infrequency of sound effects title cards in silent film.

Panel 3 reveals that either the drop from the table is very short, or Odie's front leg is going totally Plastic Man.

I Love Mondays!

Panel One: Direct address much, cat who is supposedly thinking? If that's not Garfield's sign, whose is it? Someone else in the neighborhood has a nasty cat that is worse than Garfield?

Panel Two: I will buy the excuse that Garfield almost always takes place on a straight line before a blank background, because of Jon's Spartan interior decoration. But this strip must take place in an open field.

Panel Three:
a. "Intimidation by association" isn't really far enough in meaning from "guilt by association" to be a "pun" or a "parody."

b. Garfield promptly does physically threaten someone, and has a 30-year history of prior assaults. It is less intimidation by association than "intimidation by intimidation."

c. That man is only a head taller than a cat.

d. Robert Crumb cameo?