Title Panel: Oh boy, Garfield, the gooey scrapings off your greasy spoon's grill are gray? Please serve me a pastrami sandwich and a foot-long pickle spear.
Bottom Left: The panel at the extreme bottom left corner is a prime opportunity to see just how flexible Davis is with Garfield's anatomy. The left arm needs to be 12 inches long? No sweat. Don't need the other arm? Fine, it's 12 millimeters long.
The Gesture of Kindness, Rebuked: Jon is so generous as to not only give ice cream to Garfield, but to serve it for him, and even allow Garfield to administer his own chocolate syrup. It is an act of sharing, and faith in Garfield's responsibility, and trust that he will not abuse this trust. Garfield makes good on none of Jon's good faith. The cynical observation is not to trust anyone, not to share without limit, and to take what you can, when you can. The less cynical observation is that Garfield, contented and oblivious, or maybe simply not caring, as he totally shafts Jon on the syrup, is not the role model to follow here. It is a joke about nice guys finishing last, but given no indicators of which character to empathize with, Garfield is less about lessons than observations about How Things Are.
The meek shall inherit the earth, but not before they are taken advantage of, squirrrted, guck-ed and left with naught but an empty plastic bottle.
6 comments:
In a strange turn of luck/karma, Jon may get the last laugh. Garfield's massive consumption of chocolate syrup may well kill him by theobromine poisoning.
This effectively brings Garfield's dislike of Jon to a new level of intensity, in that he'd willingly risk his own life to deprive the man of the simple pleasure of an ice cream topping.
If this were 1978, when Garfield actually looked fat and seemed to really only care about eating the meat he could steal from under Jon's nose, then theobromine poisoning would be a potential problem and probably actually pretty serious. But this is 2006. 28 years of evolution has basically made him human.
I just don't know how Davis can bring it upon himself to draw heaps of gross mayonnaise and grease and ketchup and follow that up with drawings of ice cream and chocolate syrup. Is he seriously trying to make us sick?
I love the detail of the ice cream scoop, bowls, and syrup bottle though. Say what you will about Garfield, it's one of the best-drawn strips in the paper.
The magic table is really long today. Garfield walks so far away that Jon doesn't notice his gluttony or hear the numerous "guck"s? It could be argued that Jon is too preoccupied with fixing his own bowl to notice Garfield's antics, but that's an awful lot of gucking to ignore.
I'm convinced by now that it's not really a table at all, but rather a shelf that winds around the entire inside perimeter of the house.
Well, as far as objects go, it's well drawn... but we can't say about landscapes, Garfield doesn't leave the house anymore.
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