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.

Meows in My Coffee

Disconnected Thoughts:

-I've got to confess unusual amount of persona bias today, even for Permanent Monday. I love spit takes. In physical/ photographic productions, spit takes are not only cheap, easy way to provide a striking visual image, and generate a surprising shock effect more interesting than a scream, but they externalize an emotional reaction in a semi-abstract manner only partially based on real behavior. You know what a spit take "means", even though people rarely, if ever, actually "do" spit takes.

-Garfield, toying with form, withholding spectatorial expectations, and conventional comics wisdom, eliminates the moment of release. The spit take itself falls between beats in the visual rhythms of the panels. The result is mildly deconstructive of comedy language, and a contribution to Garfield's running experimentation with denying the reader the moment of comic pleasure he is expecting, while supplying something he didn't know he wanted. Namely Jon covered in cat-spit and coffee.

-It is ambiguous if Garfield's spit take is motivated by skepticism that Jon is learning about women (uh, isn't he, probably? If anything, it's an honest admission that prior to having a steady, he didn't know anything about women), or he's amused by the unintentional (?) double-entendre Jon's made. I guess it's not really a double entendre, so much as the possibility he's talking about sexual knowledge. I don't see the point in being coy when talking about a comic strip about a cat spitting coffee on a nerd.

Keystone Clops

p1. Miserable as Garfield may make him (see panel 3!), if this is what Jon does with his spare time, keeping Garfield around may also serve the function of keeping Jon's life interesting. Not that this is much different than how I spend my spare time. Note also that Garfield himself spends even more time "zoning out", but less for the reason that he is dull, than a deep satisfaction with himself.

p2. Comics Technique 101: The relative size of the onomatopoeia sound effect is most frequently depicted in correlation to the volume of the sound it depicts. This is not the only possibility, however, and equal power may be derived from a subjective depiction of the sound. In the above Garfield strip, the sound of a plastic dish full of soft canned food landing on a man's skull which is padded with poofy hair, probably does not make such a loud "clop" as to warrant filling the entire panel with the noise. But the effect of portraying the sound as Jon hears it, and the added ability of the lettering obliterating our view of the action, maintains the mystery of the source of the noise for the third panel reveal.

p3. Bless again the decades of winnowing down Garfield comics shorthand. Three lines under Jon's eyes are all the "reaction" needed to convey his exhaustion and frustrated acceptance of Garfield's antics. We do not need to see the perpetrator to know that Garfield threw his dish, nor are we confused by the single-word horseshoe pitching joke in a thought bubble extending from off-frame. In Garfield, every simple element is weighted and clear, a model of comics refinement.

If You Give a Mouse a Coffee

Garfield's imperviousness to abuse in the second panel lets us know something is "up", and then points out one of those funny rules life. That cheese is to mice as coffee is to humans, and, er, cats (and comics bloggers) is not the most crucial point. There are times in life we will forgive, or at least overlook, personal insults, short tempers, and general bad behavior, and one of them is excusing grumpiness in people who haven't had a cup of coffee. This grace period for manners is actually nice, and I wouldn't imply it is a hypocritical standard or anything; it's just funny. Garfield forgives the mouse for being rude out of a common courtesy, and explains this to us. Garfield feels no need, however, to explain why he regularly allows the far more outrageous lapse of manners toward his housemates, of allowing vermin to cavort around the house, and in fact encourages the mice to steal food. Lest we think Garfield is being too soft letting a mouse call him "Fatso," do not lose sight of the larger discourtesy he commits in the process.

Peanuts, Featuring Fat Ol' Kitty Orange

Title Panel: Why the springtimey reproductive-themed title panel when summer is ending and autumn's hand of death is soon to wrap the nation in it's chilly grip? Has Garfield's body become a flowery cursive rendition of his own name? Or is he lurking in wait hoping for some vicarious thrill as the insects go about their natural pollenation duties? The sly smile on his lips tells no lies.

Cat Covered in Packing Peanuts - 1: Garfield regularly practices the art of pantomimed physical comedy, especially on Sundays where seven panels of a cat sleeping on a table might be too much even for Gar-fans. A lot of cartoonists would have had an establishing panel of Jon calmly drinking coffee. Garfield knows it doesn't have to. Garfield has carefully established for a quarter-century that Jon is always sitting calmly at the table.

Cat Covered in Packing Peanuts - 2: Only because Garfield's anatomy is so grotesque would anyone be frightened. If a real fat kitty walked up behind you with white foam stuck all over his fur, a real person's brain would seize up and explode from seeing the cutest thing in the universe.

Keep on Truckin'

Q: Is the appositive in the sentence "A blind date, at the monster truck rally, what was I thinking?" the best way to phrase this?

Q: Is Jon's pre-grooming morning appearance just to enhance the second-level of the joke about Garfield being put off his feed?

Q: Why did Jon see his date's bare back?

Q: What does the monster truck rally really have to do with this? I guess it's suggesting the woman is trashy as all monster truck fans are, but is female baldness a white trash stereotype?

Q: Is Jon's cup melting in panel three?

Q: Garfield, though possessing opposable thumbs, usually walking on two legs, drinking from coffee mugs, and comprehending English, still eats out of a pet bowl... with his hands. Does he resent this, or is it a personal choice?

Q: Why does PAWS, Inc. not sell cat dishes that say "GARFIELD"?

Q: Two strips about trucks this week?

The Day the Clown Napped

Jon is as determined as Jim Davis to make sure nothing too wild happens in Garfield anymore. We want a strip about a man sitting quietly at the table with a cup of coffee! I rarely criticze the writing in Garfield, but the last panel would be less crowded and the joke equally-well communicated without the cat's thought bubble.

Wardrobe notes:
*If you are wondering where Odie got that outfit, it bears striking resemblance to one Jon wore on his date last Saturday.

*The pets have bothered putting on spats, but no shoes, a funny animal fashion affectation known as the "Scrooge McDuck," though Mr. Davis has a looser grasp than Disney artists on how the accessory works.

*If Jon is so startled to see the pets in these clothes, one may question why he bought them tiny crazy outfits in the first place.

*When Garfield entered, for a split second I thought Lyman had come back.