As it turns out, Garfield is brilliant

[Dark Jaguar]

....without the cat.

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/page/1

More experiments are needed. Let's try it with just removing Garfield's thought bubbles, or maybe Jon, or no cat but the thought bubbles remain... pointing at Jon.

[EdenMaster]

:D Those were great!

[Dark Jaguar]

My favorite:

<img src="http://data.tumblr.com/fSymsOGXO5v52l90EZGpzDIk_500.jpg">

[Great Rumbler]

Funny, but not as good as Realfield:

[Dark Jaguar]

That's funny too.

[Sacred Jellybean]

Hahaha, they had a big list of these going at another forum I went to. Pretty funny.

There was one person who drew Jon and Garfield in a weird simplistic Soviet-like picture. Jon was this weird kind of white blob that was crying, and Garfield had eyes like so: ><. And he ate Jon's dinner. And Jon kept crying.

I wish I could find that. :(

[lazyfatbum]

I just woke up and I spit coffee all over myself.

These are absolute genius especially the "There's something wrong with my pants." and "I found a quarter" dear god

[lazyfatbum]

omg "have something to eat."

[lazyfatbum]

"i'm going on an imaginary date tonight!"

oh god im crying

[Dark Jaguar]

I get the impression that somewhere, Jim Davis is saying "someone finally gets it".

[Sacred Jellybean]

I wonder how much Jim Davis still has to do with the comic. I wouldn't be surprised if he left it to ghostwriters years ago... it's such a simple cut-and-paste, canned-joke comic (hell, most of it is Garfield making wisecracks to Jon on a table), coupled with the fact that Davis sees it as more of a business than an art, that I wouldn't be surprised if he just plays golf all day and gets a check from Universal every week.

[lazyfatbum]

yeah but look, look *points*

"what do you want on your bologna?"

*the cat doesn't move*

*the cat doesn't move*

*the cat doesn't move*

omfg why is that so funny?

[Dark Jaguar]

I don't know. It's pretty funny to me though.

On the other hand, the one with the cat actually eating Jon's food isn't very funny... That one would have been better with no cat at all. Like, he just ate his own food.

[Sacred Jellybean]

(No, I didn't make it, but it's hilarious)

[edit] Whoops, sorry. Now attaching...

[Dark Jaguar]

No linking from this host o.... and then it ends... I cry now...

[Great Rumbler]

It's funny because Garfield and Jon aren't really from Akira.

[Sacred Jellybean]

I just noticed that the artist forgot to take out the dates at the bottom.

[Dark Jaguar]

Try this on for size!

[alien space marine]

Cannot comprehend veneration for the orange obese feline and its owner.

:FuckYou:

[Great Rumbler]

Dadaism is funny.

[Dark Jaguar]

Cannot comprehend veneration for the orange obese feline and its owner.

:FuckYou:

You uh... always seem to be a few steps behind us.

[lazyfatbum]

That's not really dadaism. Its funny! dont get me rong.

Jon: *wearing a sombrero* Hey Garfield what do you call a Spanish-Italian

Garfield: Spagettios.

That's not dadaism, either.

[lazyfatbum]

Neither is this.

[lazyfatbum]

Nope.

[lazyfatbum]

http://media.uselessjunk.org/images/stor...porn_1.jpg

Getting there. But imagine it framed.

[lazyfatbum]

A website celebrating the birth of a calf, its mother sheduled to be slaughtered in a few days.

Close?

[lazyfatbum]

Frame it, call it "And God Created Man" and you have yourself something that's almost modern dadaism. *almost*

[alien space marine]

Gay He man sings

[Dark Jaguar]

Yes yes, it's anti art anti establishment stuff. The definition isn't even all that iron clad. Basically if it doesn't make sense and defies being understood, it's dada. It doesn't have to offend, and honestly with the internet like it is, that's pretty much an impossible requirement anyway.

[Dark Jaguar]

On second thought, if Garfield ever tried for the "deep" approach, we might end up with this again:

[Sacred Jellybean]

I like how people theorize that that comic signified that the rest of the series was just Garfield hallucinating while slowly dying of starvation. Yes... when I think of Garfield, I think of delusions to stave off hunger. Maybe that's why he loves lasagna so much.

[lazyfatbum]

He's actually saying the world is on fire, but then he says "run" which is hilarious. If he was psychotic and in a Jacob's Ladder situation he'd probably be thin, at a vet and and with Odie and Jon crying in the hallway. Of course Odie probably never existed and was only formed in the imagination of Garfield as his own avatar of innocense that he destroyed in his bitterness through the years because he accepted his lack of a life (while Jon constantly fights its reality).

imo the camera getting closer should have eventually become the pure white of his eye with just the word "run" firmly in the middle as if he's saying the physical world is destroying itself, find protection in your mind.

Dude Garfield is deep.

[Dark Jaguar]

[lazyfatbum]

aaaaahahahaha :D I feel like that for at least 2 hours a day.

[A Black Falcon]

But without Garfield, Jon makes no sense... I like Garfield better the way it is. :)

[Great Rumbler]

WHAT

[EdenMaster]

But without Garfield, Jon makes no sense...

It's...

I...

You...

Ugh, forget it.

[Dark Jaguar]

ABF, clearly you've never experienced pure desperation. That's what the garfield comic is, and it is startingly accurate.

[A Black Falcon]

It's...

I...

You...

Ugh, forget it.

What, I actually kind of like Garfield? Always have, actually.

[Dark Jaguar]

I still don't see what you mean by "Jon makes no sense". He's losing his mind and talking to himself out of the sheer boredom and hopelessness of his quiet suburban life. That said, everything he says without the cat makes perfect sense in that context.

Think of it, a man sitting at a counter looking back and forth and suddenly saying "we have the best maintained toaster on the block", as though he's just been there doing nothing all day and had to say one thing to justify his existance, before he notices gas prices at $6 and puts his head in an oven.

[Great Rumbler]

What, I actually kind of like Garfield? Always have, actually.

Why? The comic is nothing more than a poor charicature of what it used to be, which wasn't exactly cream-of-the-crop to begin with. As it stands now, Jim Davis does virtually nothing, allowing his cohorts to mass-produce panels and punchlines in a never-ending assembly line of tired, worn out jokes that have been repeated ad nauseum for the past thirty years. All the characters that were actually interesting? Gone. All the adventures that Garfield used to have? Gone. Because those take too much time and too much effort. If you still read and laugh at Garfield comics, then you are part of the problem.

[Dark Jaguar]

I still laugh at the occasional Garfield comic...

[Great Rumbler]

When they have half a dozen strips in a row that feature only FOUR unique panels, you know there's a problem.

[Dark Jaguar]

Yeah it's not something I regularly read.

[Sacred Jellybean]

Yeah, Garfield is funny enough to elicit a small chuckle once in a while, but most of it is tired crap and a shell of its former self. It's more of a business than a good comic strip. There's nothing entirely wrong with seeing comic strips as a business, but Garfield's artistic integrity is obviously compromised when it's nothing more than a joke factory of sarcasm of the same jokes surrounding the fatness/laziness of Garfield, kicking Odie off the table, Jon being a loser, etc. Not to mention the free-spirited commercialization. Garfield reminding kids to read? Oh, you kidder Jim Davis!

There are better comic strips out there, but it'd be nice if there was more flexibility involved for the artist instead of having to cram everything into a tiny space. Bill Watterson was able to fight a bit for that to introduce the half-page comic that doesn't have to be conveniently reformatted to 1/3 or 1/4 page or smaller panel. Unfortunately, newspaper sales are plummeting, and the funnies are (for good reason) seen as something secondary that should be subject to the convenience of the editors. A lot of good comics are released online for this reason, which is a good alternative.

[Dark Jaguar]

I understand Bill Watterson is actually a feral nomad wandering the jungles.

http://eviljoshandbilly.keentoons.com/toons/ejb08.html

[A Black Falcon]

Sure, true, it rehashes the same jokes over and over. And yes, I agree that it used to be better; the Garfield cartoon in the late '80s/early '90s was particularly great. But really, the way that most newspaper comics work is by having a static world and then telling the same jokes over and over in it. Only a very few don't use that formula... Doonesbury, most prominently. But a lot of very popular comics just repeat the same things over and over, and people like them because they've come to expect it, and maybe because some of the jokes are funny.

I mean, Blondie has been in the papers since 1930. 1930! That's an incredibly long time for a comic strip! And yes, it has made some changes over the years to keep some of the humor fresh, like when Blondie got a job as a caterer. But the core jokes, about Dagwood sleeping or running into the mailman, the giant sandwiches, etc... those have been similar for a very long time. But even so, it's a good comic. Peanuts was good too. Its best and most creative years were earlier on, certainly, but even so, it was a good comic for most of its 50-odd year run...

Garfield isn't one of the best comics in the paper now (it's no Doonsbury, Non Sequitur, etc), but it is entertaining.

There are better comic strips out there, but it'd be nice if there was more flexibility involved for the artist instead of having to cram everything into a tiny space. Bill Watterson was able to fight a bit for that to introduce the half-page comic that doesn't have to be conveniently reformatted to 1/3 or 1/4 page or smaller panel. Unfortunately, newspaper sales are plummeting, and the funnies are (for good reason) seen as something secondary that should be subject to the convenience of the editors. A lot of good comics are released online for this reason, which is a good alternative.

It's not Calvin & Hobbes equal, but I would say that Non Sequitur is one of the more artistically interesting comics around today. There are some others, but that's one of my favorites... it has a somewhat distinctive vertical sunday strip, as well as the usual horizontal alignment of the weekday one (though it generally does not use panels, just a box).