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.

Dog Bytes Man

At a glance, it may be a standard-issue "These Days Everybody Is On The Internet!" joke. Garfield is usually surprisingly in-touch with technology for a strip about a cat and a guy sitting around at a table; it's in a rare league with Dilbert and Fox Trot of strips that don't blow it every time a computer appears. Everybody Is On The Internet is not a particularly offensive or ignorant joke anyway, and this one comes with added Garfield venom.

Everybody is on the Internet, even those people with no real reason to be. If there is any knowledge or entertainment to be gained from the official Tabasco Sauce website, we are hard pressed to find it. Garfield's joke points out that not only is everyone on the Internet, and not only do they not need websites, but some individuals and experiences cannot/ should not be translated to the medium. The dog is so swept up in the perception of a website as modern necessity, that he contradicts the purpose of his sign in the first place, namely as a warning to avoid the dog. As a MAD Magazine fold-out poster said, "DO NOT READ THIS SIGN".

The strip confirms the central hollowness of virtual replacement for real-world experience, no matter how miserable (e.g.- getting bitten by a crazy dog). All Garfield has to see is "www" before glancing out at his audience to confirm our mutual disgust. Do not read this Internet.

Kitteo Rewind

Garfield takes frequent aim at those elements of its own fabric most complained-about and misunderstood by critics, and in the process lays to waste the complaints and successfully turns the mirror on the strip. This Sunday strip is a prime example.

Title Panel: Between the apparent whimsy of the lovable cartoon cat and the reader's heart is the cold reality of the PAWS merchandising interest. Playful, colorful fish leap about, google-eyed, their doom in Garfield's stomach already written upon their very bodies. The last in line bears the Registered Trademark symbol upon his scales.

The Strip: The same two drawings repeated 2.5 times (and with the implication of endless repetition) become the raw material for the joke. The content, you've seen before - Garfield kicking Odie off the table - and seen for years, the same joke repeated in variation ad nauseum. You've heard the complaint that Garfield is the same jokes every day - Garfield is fat, Garfield is lazy, Jon is a nerd, Garfield is mean - but if you think Jim Davis doesn't know this, or it is an insult to your intelligence, or even a flaw in the comic strip, you are missing the point.

I Guess: Garfield set up a camera to capture his own exploits? This doesn't surprise me, and I certainly don't put it past Garfield, but it says a lot about the nature of kicking-Odie-off-the-table gags. Like most of Garfield, success in life isn't about grabbing surprising opportunities, but exploiting the patterns of predestination all around you.

The Punchline: Garfield rightly identifies perusing his adventures as "treasured memories." I get a lot of email that boils down to "I used to like Garfield as a kid, but the apparent lack of sophistication drove me away as an adult." The pleasure of the strip is Davis' ability to conjure infinite variations on the same jokes, daily stories from drawings that look more or less the same, and characters who remain in relative physical and emotional stasis. When Garfield is at its best, these regulatory boundaries themselves become the subject of the jokes. So "whatcha' watching?" = "why are you looking at the same two drawings over and over?" The answer is: it may be an exercise in cruelty, but I like it.

Kitten On the Wind

I have no problems with the commercial juggernaut of Garfield. My home obviously stores a fair amount of PAWS-licensed paraphernalia, and any accusations that Jim Davis has whored his kitten on the marketplace will fall on deaf ears. No matter how garish the ancillary merch gets, it doesn't effect the spiritual despair of the strip. If a Garfield pillowcase makes a some 6-year-old happy, I say no harm done in this case. In fact, I love that Davis' calculated attempt to capture America's imagination on a Snoopy-level involved morbid obesity, anger and relentless unhappiness, and the nation couldn't get enough.

And I don't doubt that when I'm done typing this, I'm going to download the daily Garfield-delivery application to my phone.

But for real, advertising it in the Sunday strip title panel!? Brilliant.

Windy Day
The structural effort of an explanatory punchline after six pantomimed panels is admirable, but honestly I think the art in the very first frame is too explicit to expect any reader to be confused about what is happening. What is disorienting is that the weather is such that a 27-pound cat is blown across the lawn but the wind does not cause a ripple across the surface of the birdbath. That and Jon's activity for the day, which seems to be standing around the living room wearing a red cap.

Negative interior decoration points for the poor attempts at Southwestern style. It always looks silly in Midwestern homes, and worse when it extends no further than one sub-roadside-truck-sale landscape painting.

Paws On-Cup-orated

The awesomeness of Jon's ineptness with women is that he is not nerdy and shy around them, but nerdy and far too confident. Nebbishness wears thin for me, misguided bravado does not.

Yes, yes, Jon's pet name for Liz is weird and yes, would've been funnier if it were "Snooky-Wookiee", but I think we all know the meat here is in panel three. A lot of people would've had the punchline be that the overweight ugly receptionist gets excited by Jon's come-on, but Jim Davis allows no character to feel loved: she's horrified.

RE: Panel Three
-Surely I am not the only person who at first glance before reading the word balloons thought that in panel three Jon morphed into a fat lady named Nel? The layout of all three panels is so identical that there's no reason to suddenly think we've "cut" to a different building... especially since that happens about twice a year in Garfield. This might've been remedied by, say, putting Nel's computer on the opposite side of the frame, or her body in a position that doesn't exactly mirror Jon's. I offer these solutions though I don't want it remedied.

-As do all good veterinary receptionists, Nel keeps a green condom in her pencil cup.

-And a tiny blue Odie serves as Salacious Crumb to Nel's slug-bodied, earless Jabba.

I Was Sure He'd Be Listening to "Am I Cool Or What?"

Gag panel and strip-proper unity alert! This rare occurrence is intensified by an equally rare joke-about-modern-technology. I do like that the strip isn't reliant on iPods in specific; in 1995, it could've been about Garfield's DiscMan, or in 1989 it could've been about Garfield's new Fisher-Price Pocket Rockers. There's also no hint of the hacky comic strip trope wherein fogeys cannot comprehend the technology of today- e.g. Dagwood shooting himself in the brain because he sees a VCR.

I read Garfield every day, but I'm first to admit that the humor is low-key, if not check-for-pulse catatonic - that's part of the fun. But this punchline actually made me laugh aloud. I even like Jon's innocent excitement to find out what delightful sounds must be inspiring this reverie. This is a fat-guy joke par excellence, and there should be much back-patting in Casa Davis this eve.

Finally, in the Gag Panel, Garfield's right earbud cord is loooong.