"Garfield" Is Not Funny

And now for the lighter side of things . . .

Like any ailurophile, I started out liking Jim Davis' strip "Garfield."  After "Peanuts" had popularized dogs with Snoopy, it was refreshing to see a cat in the funnies, especially a cat as the title character in a strip.  But, after reading "Garfield" for so long, I realized something - the strip isn't very funny.  In fact, once you've read it long enough, you realize it's not really funny at all.

The humor of "Garfield" - if it can be called that - centers on not-so-humorous character traits, depicting Garfield as a cynical, gluttonous, oversized and somewhat nasty cat.  This is in stark contrast to Charles Schulz's "Peanuts,"  which used gentle humor and light philosophical musings to make us laugh or smile. "Garfield" barely elicits a humor-based reaction at all, because there's nothing funny as a pet you'd never want to own.  A lot of people would love to have a dog like Snoopy; who would want to have a cat like Garfield?    

"Garfield"'s "humor" is more mean-spirited than anything else, as evidenced by the strip below.

It's also inane . . .

 . . . and flat-out dumb.

Jim Davis didn't really start his strip to entertain comic-strip readers.  He wanted to create a cartoon character that could make him lots of money through merchandising, in the form of Garfield plush toys, Garfield radios, Garfield calendars, Garfield pencils, and so on and so on and so on.  Davis doesn't even draw the strip anymore; he farms it out to hired artists, which is why Garfield's appearance has changed over the years.  When Davis started the strip in 1978, this is what Garfield looked like.  

Not exactly an adorable kitty.

Charles Schulz gave Davis pointers on how to draw better when Davis first started, but Davis paid little attention to Schulz's advice. Schulz grew to resent "Garfield"'s success, as he saw the strip as inferior and was annoyed by all of the merchandising.  "Peanuts" was (and still is) merchandised too, of course, but for Schulz, merchandising came second behind the quality of the strip, his top concern. 

Meanwhile, Patrick McDonnell, who created the pet-centered comic strip "Mutts," took an approach more similar to Schulz's than Davis'.  He uses the same simple, gentle humor that "Peanuts" is known for, and while his drawing is much less sophisticated than Schulz's was, his two main characters - an adopted dog named Earl and an adopted cat named Mooch - are quite cute.  McDonnell's art work is not unlike the drawings in classic early-twentieth-century strips like George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," a strip Schulz idolized. ("I always thought if I could do something as good as 'Krazy Kat,' I would be happy," Schulz said in 1967. "'Krazy Kat' was always my goal.")  Schulz would call "Mutts" one of the best strips ever, saying that it was "exactly what a comic strip should be."

Also, McDonnell uses his strip to promote animal welfare and pet adoptions from animal shelters, believing there are few greater loves one can give than to a domestic animal who needs a home. "Garfield," by contrast, stands as an argument against pet adoption.

"Garfield" will likely continue for the next few years, but I don't think it will be remembered so well once the strip is retired.  And it will not likely be rerun like "Peanuts" has been since Schulz died in 2000.  But it serves as a reminder of the biggest thing wrong with the American dream - some people just fake it 'til they make it.

It makes sense that "Garfield" thus took off in the 1980s, the decade that gave us Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, two of America's biggest fakers.

*

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid.  I drew a comic strip - mainly for my own amusement - patterned after "Peanuts."  It was lousy. The jokes were stupid, the characters were one-dimensional, and the drawings were little more than sophisticated stick figures.  One lesson I learned from drawing my own cartoon is that just because you love doing something doesn't mean you're good at it.  A friend of mine, incidentally, draws a serial superhero cartoon for a local paper.  And it's gosh darn awful.  I don't have the heart to tell her that, as a cartoonist, she's even worse than Jim Davis.    

Comic Relief

I haven't read a comic strip in ages.

"60 Minutes" re-aired an Andy Rooney essay last night in which Rooney lamented that what used to be called the "funny papers" aren't so funny anymore. I agree to a considerable extent, since I had found myself reading the comic strips in the newspapers and finding myself chuckling mildly rather than laughing out loud. Old favorites have outstayed their welcome in my local paper (some of which have been continued by hired artists after the deaths of their creators), while some strips I like - Jim Toomey's "Sherman's Lagoon," for example - don't appear there. The only strip that still guarantees a real laugh, in fact, would have to be Stefan Pastis's "Pearls Before Swine." But I don't even read that anymore.

One big reason I don't read the comics these days is this: More and more strips - not just the serious ones of the "Mary Worth" variety, but funny ones as well - have ongoing stories. Though my mother and I subscribe to a local paper, we only get it Thursdays through Sundays to save money. If I don't read comic strips like "Funky Winkerbean" or "Louann," which increasingly use ongoing storylines, on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, how I can figure out what's going on? (Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean," incidentally, is a strip that used to be hilarious but now has grown more serious and brooding, with only flashes of its original brilliance.)

Other strips have disappeared, either dropped by my paper (I miss "Marvin") or discontinued by their creators. Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston retired her strip "For Better of For Worse" in 2008, and even though it could be annoying - I sometimes suspected a bit of hostility toward the male sex in this strip about a family of five - it was interesting in that the characters grew and aged in real time. Those readers of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger who want to know what Johnston's strip was like can read reprints of the color strips in the Sunday comic pages. The state of comic strips in general is probably best demonstrated not by the reprints of current strips from creators on sabbatical but reprints of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts," as Schulz died in 2000. The fact that "Peanuts" is still more popular than current strips is roughly the equivalent of people still buying Beatles records because they're just not into the Hold Steady.

Comic strips are clearly going the way of rock and roll these days.

Stefan Pastis himself once dismissed most comic strips as banal and irrelevant, and he's been proven right so much that I don't miss the comic pages on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Or any other day, for that matter.