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Old 02-02-2014, 07:16 AM   #1
McSweeney
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Garfield

Continuing the discussion that began here ... http://forums.upnetwork.net/showthre...?t=5340&page=2

As Talon explained, Garfield was once well respected and beloved. However, somewhere along the line, people began to turn against it, and it became the butt of jokes and held up as a prime example of an unfunny comic strip. Even my own brother, who read all the books along with me, denounced it after he became a fan of the Internet comedian Maddox, who wrote an article titled "Garfield Sucks". In fairness, this negative shift was brought upon itself, as the quality declined during the mid 1990s. Unfortunately, people often make the assumption that it was ALWAYS bad, when that is not the case!

I didn't make this thread to try and convince you that Garfield is good. The comic is what it is. Even at its peak there were lots of mediocre strips, but there were enough funny ones that I was constantly smiling and giggling while reading through the old books, and there was even the rare heartwarming strip. Garfield was a big part of pop culture, and anyone who was a kid growing up in the 80s or early 90s must have SOME familiarity with it. This is the thread where we share Garfield related memories, favourite strips, etc.

The decline

The first book I noticed that was less than stellar was the 28th book, "Life In The Fat Lane", consisting of strips made in 1994. They weren't bad enough to be cringe worthy or anything, but the strips that I would call exceptional were getting to be fewer and fewer. This trend would hold steady up until book 30 (the last one I own), and through 1997. 1998 is when the comic began to have a dramatic and noticeable deterioration in quality. The vast majority of strips started to fall into one of two categories:

1. Super cheap gag. Sometimes the punch line is so weak that there's barely a joke at all, and you're just left wondering, "What the hell, is that it? Whatever, next strip." Sometimes Garfield will do something like simply acknowledge the existence of the Internet and Jim Davis is like, "Yep, that oughta do her. My work is done here!"

2. Jon says something that's actually kinda funny, related to him being a loser, but it's ruined by Garfield's totally unfunny, smart ass remark at the end. 1998 is when these kinds of strips started to appear at a very high frequency. Garfield's sarcastic remarks used to complement what Jon said, now it destroys it. Garfield has lost all the wit he once possessed, and just sounds like a dick now. This is where Garfield Minus Garfield proves to be very useful!

Here is my breakdown of each era, quality of strips, and frequency:

Golden age (1978 - 1993)

Crappy: Rare if not non-existent
Mediocre: Common
Solid: Common
Exceptional: Uncommon

Beginning of decline (1994 - 1997)

Crappy: Uncommon
Mediocre: Common
Solid: Uncommon
Exceptional: Rare

Modern era, Jim Davis has clearly run out of ideas, and who can blame him (1998 - Present)

Crappy: Common
Mediocre: Common
Solid: Uncommon
Exceptional: Rare if not non-existent

Garfield is now 34 years old, and this isn't a case of cartoon characters being frozen in time, because they always announce his age during birthday arcs. Still within the realm of possibility, as the oldest cat on record lived to be 38 years old!
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Old 02-02-2014, 07:17 AM   #2
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Now it's sharing time! Here's some strips that are either funny or interesting in some way.

I like the Nermal arcs a lot. I find Garfield and Nermal's tsundere relationship to be adorable. Yes, I am aware that Nermal is a guy. Damn, I'm watching clips of Garfield and Friends on YouTube ... Nermal looks like a girl and IS VOICED BY a girl. I know it's common to have a woman voice a young boy character, but she didn't even try to sound like a boy! Jim Davis should have just made Nermal a girl. Maybe it would be too politically incorrect to have Garfield beating up a girl and throwing her through windows. Hey, that hasn't stopped him before!
Spoiler: show








Usually it's Garfield on the receiving end of age/weight related insults, so I love it when Nermal gets uppity and is put in his place by Garfield.









Garfield frequently throws Nermal through the door when he annoys him. It's so common for Garfield to destroy stuff around the house that it was funny and a little meta for Jon to actually acknowledge that he needs to buy and install a new door every single time he does that.



Last strip in a Nermal arc where Garfield and Nermal were antagonistic toward each other throughout.



Irma and the dive diner:
Spoiler: show











Some sad endings:
Spoiler: show


Last strip in an arc where a chick hatches, and the first thing he sees is Garfield, so he thinks he's his daddy. A reluctant Garfield does some bonding with him ("No son of mine would ever refuse lasagna!"). We never see him again after this.






Some cute ones. Strips like this stopped appearing after the 1980s.
Spoiler: show








Talon said in the previous thread that one of the reasons why people hate Garfield is because it's so annoyingly wholesome and inoffensive. This is true, but that's part of its charm! However, there's actually some rare strips that have some off colour jokes and morbid humour. Some examples:
Spoiler: show



We can only hope that he's watching Annette after she got older, not as an underaged Mouseketeer!
















Undoubtedly the grossest strip ever made. Even worse than the one where Garfield replaces a sleepy Jon's toothbrush with the toilet brush.








The infamous Halloween arc. This one scared the piss out of me as a kid! Another one that freaked me out is when Garfield had this dream about eating everything in the house, eating Jon, and he grew bigger and bigger until he was this Akira-like monstrosity eating cities and planets.
Spoiler: show

















It was funnier when Jon was single.
Spoiler: show

















Garfield hitting you with some truths about life!
Spoiler: show







This whole arc was great.











I don't know about you guys but this definitely happened to me!



Some meta jokes:
Spoiler: show




I once went through the old books and tried to find the exact moment when Garfield starts walking on his hind legs, but it was too difficult to pinpoint. He used to only do it when he was carrying something or reaching for a pie, but then he would sometimes do it for no reason, and sometimes not. Now he always does. It's definitely correlated to his legs lengthening over the years. I don't know why Jon is always giving him a hard time about being fat when he's clearly lost a lot of weight since 1978!






Some random funny ones:
Spoiler: show


JON FINALLY LOSES HIS SHIT!




Garfield is friends with the mice, much to Jon's chagrin.



A variation on the "I hate to see a grown man cry" line that Davis was fond of using.


More Uncle Roy!




This one might be my all time favourite lol











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Old 02-02-2014, 10:23 AM   #3
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Below is a list of links to all of the Garfield-related discussion that took place in the thread "Worst cartoon you've ever seen?"I think that about covers it. I felt it was important to provide links to these posts (and, more importantly, to identify the strips we shared) so that people don't necessarily mistake the submissions you made above -- all of them excellent -- for the ones that we first enjoyed discussing. I don't want people to say, "Yeah, he's got good taste ... but how could he have left out the squirrel strip of '85? Or the airplane strip of '82? C'mon, man! Those were classics!" Let the record show that you did indeed make mention of or share other excellent strips before sharing the awesome ones above.

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Old 02-02-2014, 12:27 PM   #4
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I used to read a lot of Garfield during the Garfield & Friends era. When my Dad was single, he was a huge fan! He also had a cat and while not exactly a loser like Jon, was anxious given his advancing age (37). The comic really spoke to him (along with San Francisco-based Peanuts). He collected a huge number of the strip volumes, and when I was little (~7?) I wandered into the family room and discovered them. I hope they're still around somewhere but I have a feeling he sold them finally.

I got Garfield's signature at Incredible Universe (eventually absorbed by Fry's Electronics) sometime in the late '90s, at least when Spiderman the cartoon was airing because I got Spiderman's signature too. Garfield signed Volume #1.

I don't have any particularly favourite strips, but I really liked the humour of the early ones. I also liked Garfield's design better, to be honest. He actually had (fat) cat anatomy whereas now he looks a lot like a small human/baby.
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Old 02-02-2014, 03:53 PM   #5
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Random fun fact that I remembered upon seeing this particular strip again... I actually owned quite a few of the Garfield Books when I was a kid (up to #18, I think), and I remember that it was this strip that made me look up and learn what chloroform was and how it was typically used. It's probably also bad to admit that once I learned about chloroform, my little ten year old self thought this strip was pretty damn funny.
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Old 02-02-2014, 04:38 PM   #6
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I've always liked Garfield and ignored people who trash talk the strip (though tbh it doesn't come up in conversation that often), but seeing McSweeney's picks, I realized that I always liked old Garfield, never read the less funny stuff, and therefore just associate Garfield with his golden days. I used to read those Garfield books over and over.
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Old 02-03-2014, 12:10 AM   #7
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Something weird I discovered: I actually own TWO copies of book 25, "Garfield Hits The Big Time" wtf? The only explanation I can think of is my brother and I must have both received one as a stocking stuffer on Christmas 1993. Anyone want one? lol

Quote:
Originally Posted by Talon87 View Post
I felt it was important to provide links to these posts (and, more importantly, to identify the strips we shared) so that people don't necessarily mistake the submissions you made above -- all of them excellent -- for the ones that we first enjoyed discussing. I don't want people to say, "Yeah, he's got good taste ... but how could he have left out the squirrel strip of '85? Or the airplane strip of '82? C'mon, man! Those were classics!" Let the record show that you did indeed make mention of or share other excellent strips before sharing the awesome ones above.
Yeah, if I had to name a #1 best strip of all time, it'd probably be the one I linked in the previous thread where Jon finds Garfield and Odie and says, "What a surprise to find you guys in a pet shop! I would have never thought to look there" "Then what were you...? Forget it I'd rather not know" But it requires the proper context of seeing the whole arc, so you understand all the struggles they went through. It was such a happy moment and a big relief, with a touch of sadness as he carried them off into the horizon. So beautiful! The best ending imaginable for that arc.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Doppleganger View Post
I don't have any particularly favourite strips, but I really liked the humour of the early ones. I also liked Garfield's design better, to be honest. He actually had (fat) cat anatomy whereas now he looks a lot like a small human/baby.
Agreed. He looked perfect in the mid 80s, when he had shed enough weight since the 70s to actually have the necessary mobility to perform certain gags, but hadn't yet "evolved" to walking on his hind legs all the time. Another thing I hate about modern Garfield comics is his super wide grin. Looks stupid. An example.

Well, when I was a kid, it was impossible to find the moment Garfield started walking on his hind legs, but I did find Lyman's last appearance. He never officially left, he just gradually stopped appearing. This isn't it, but, lol.

Spoiler: show


It's hard to believe that the comic has been going on since the 70s, but it's evidenced by a strip in the very first book where you see Lyman dressed up and about to go out to a disco.


Oh lord, look at all this 80s swag!

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Old 02-03-2014, 12:56 AM   #8
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[Garfield] looked perfect in the mid 80s, when he had shed enough weight since the 70s to actually have the necessary mobility to perform certain gags, but hadn't yet "evolved" to walking on his hind legs all the time. Another thing I hate about modern Garfield comics is his super wide grin. Looks stupid. An example.
Yeah, I totally agree. Garfield in the early volumes (1, 2, 3, 4, and I think 5 but I think that was more of a transitional period) is this morbidly obese and, frankly, rather ugly cat. It's not until we enter the Golden Era circa Volume 6 that Garfield takes on this lovable chubby cute look to him. He's still kinda ugly in the face (the older, the uglier) but it's evolved to a point that he's "ugly in a cute way". His body shape is now rather cute but is still quite overweight. (The older, the heavier.) And then bit by incremental bit, Davis changes how he draws Garfield, and over the years the cat becomes slender-bodied and (disproportionately) big-headed, perma-bipedal, and more like the cat people know from the cartoon. Comics-wise this change still takes place amidst the Golden Era and doesn't on its own take us out of those happy times, but it was definitely a sign of things to come.

One thing that comes to mind with Davis -- a topic I'd love to discuss another day in greater detail -- is that I think he went too far as an artist. You can think of it like people who get cosmetic surgery, trying to make their faces look perfect. The first surgery or two might honestly make the person more attractive. But where normal people would then stop, these individuals feel like they haven't achieved perfection yet and they press on. And on. And on. Until by the time they're satisfied with what they've achieved, everyone else in society looks at them in horror and disgust. This is a fascinating curse which sadly afflicts a significant (though thankfully minor i.e. minority) proportion of the comic artist community. I've seen it happen to a number of eromangaka. I've seen it happen to several web comic artists, most notably Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik. And I think it's what sadly befell Jim Davis as well. Garfield is like that plastic surgery patient. She was a genuine candidate for improvement to begin with ('79 Garfield), and so one or two surgeries later out she came and we all said, "Wow, you look radiant." ('81 Garfield.) Not content, Davis was like, "I can do better " and continued to evolve how he drew Garfield. This was like giving the lady a third and then a fourth plastic surgery. And we're sitting there going, "Okaaaaaay ..." but we don't say anything. Out the other end comes late '80s Garfield. Well, he's fine too. Maybe not quite as nice as early '80s Garfield, but he's fine. But the things we find offputting about late '80s Garfield (the exaggerated grin, the permanent bipedalism), Davis only further develops as he goes. So he puts this woman under the knife for a fifth, a sixth, a seventh plastic surgery, and out the other end comes a plastic nightmare. (Mid-'90s Garfield.) He's taken the grin we weren't too keen on and made it huge. He's taken the bipedalism we weren't crazy about and locked it in with enormous flat feet. He's taken Garfield's eyes, ever increasing in size, and made them the size of dinner plates. Has the art style of the comic "evolved" in the general sense of the word? Oh, totally! Mid-'90s Garfield is the most "evolved" Garfield yet! The product of late '80s Garfield who in turn comes from early '80s Garfield who in turn comes from late '70s Garfield! But the thing is, is he really evolved? Or has Garfield in fact devolved? And that's the problem: yeah, you may be at the top of your game technically, Mr. Davis, but you've lost us aesthetically.

Would really love to discuss the topic at greater length regarding other artists ... but this really isn't the thread for it. Should save it for some other day. But yes, I've seen this happen a number of times in the eromanga community and it breaks my heart every single time. Makes me that much happier for the ones who have been drawing for 10+ years and still haven't shown signs of the curse.
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Old 02-03-2014, 01:14 AM   #9
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Lil' Bluey

I haven't read any Garfield strips in years so seeing the recent ones is a new experience to me. I think the most jarring part of the new design is how huge his feet are in comparison to the rest of his body. I don't mind so much the (perma-)bipedalism, but by george if dem toes don't accentuate it. o.O;
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Old 02-03-2014, 01:16 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lilbluecorsola View Post
I haven't read any Garfield strips in years so seeing the recent ones is a new experience to me. I think the most jarring part of the new design is how huge his feet are in comparison to the rest of his body. I don't mind so much the (perma-)bipedalism, but by george if dem toes don't accentuate it. o.O;
Whoa, feet that enormous weren't even what I had in my mind's eye when I talked about how Davis expanded the feet yet further in the mid-'90s. But yeah. Damn. That strip from 2014 is pretty solid proof of exactly what I am saying with the plastic surgery addiction analogy.
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Old 02-03-2014, 01:23 AM   #11
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Reading the books was always tons of fun. I can think of at least one gag that was made better in book form, even though it required your knowing on which days of the week the strips were supposed to appear.

Monday strip: Garfield is asleep in bed for all 3 frames.
Tuesday strip: Garfield wakes up and thinks, "You know it's Monday when you wake up and it's Tuesday."

I can imagine that if you were to pick up the newspaper at random on Tuesday and see that strip without context, it would be a lot less funny. And if you picked it up on Monday, you'd probably be irritated at how lame this Garfield comic is because there's no joke or anything. But you read it in the book and it's like, I see what you did there.

On the topic of morbid subjects in the series, I clicked the "Random" button and got this:
Spoiler: show

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Old 02-03-2014, 01:25 AM   #12
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That strip LBC posted doesn't even make sense. Garfield complains about walking distances, but he's headed off in the other direction.

Morg's makes me sad because my cat suicided. ;_;
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Old 02-03-2014, 01:37 AM   #13
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Lil' Bluey

Seriously just look at these things. They're longer than his own legs.

...It's like a human foot but not. =x
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Old 02-03-2014, 06:35 AM   #14
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You know what else is huge now: Liz's lips!! http://garfield.com/comic/2013-12-20

Equating artists trying too hard to "improve" their creations to people getting too much plastic surgery is a great analogy, I'll have to remember that one! I'm not a big Penny Arcade guy, but I enjoyed some of their strips a long time ago ("Pikachu just knocked you the FUCK out man. WOO!"). Then I read some more years later, and noticed the art had taken a rather unappealing turn; their faces became TOO expressive, their hair TOO big and crazy. Now, I'm looking at some recent ones and it looks like it's changed dramatically yet again. Gabe looks like a little kid with buck teeth now! Yeesh.



I found the Akira one I mentioned that freaked me out as a kid! It's not as bad as I remembered. I think what disturbed me the most was how he ate Jon.
Spoiler: show


And another one for the morbid files:
Spoiler: show
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Old 03-27-2014, 01:29 PM   #15
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Yey, Garfield! I've always loved Garfield. I read the books to death as a kid and even kept a collection of Garfield comics cut out from the newspaper from 1997-2010. (I kind of stopped doing that because I don't always get the newspaper, and I'm too lazy to actually cut the comics out.) I agree with the sentiments that Garfield's peak was in the 1980s and early 1990s with clever humor and epic story arcs and that more recent comics are bland and rather non-sequitur. However, having collected there are still some gems among all the dreck.

Garfield has been obsessing over his birthday for years now, but for his 25th birthday in 2003, the strip decided to go all meta and feature Garfield meeting himself from 25 year prior. It was an interesting twist that showed the progress of the strip, and then they wisely cut it off before the strip devolved into "what has changed over the past 25 years," although that may be better than some of what is being shown now.
Spoiler: show









Liz being Jon's girlfriend is something that's fairly tired now mostly becuase it's been almost eight years since they got together and they don't really do much, relegating Liz to a role that Lyman filled about 30 years ago, but back when they first got together it was a fresh direction for the comic. And the arc where they did get together was pretty neat, when Jon actually gets a date with Ellen, somebody he's been tormenting in the past
Spoiler: show













Jon getting a plunger stuck to his face is always good for some visual and situational gags.
Spoiler: show







This set of strips from October 2001 were certainly different. The punchline is that Garfield gets attacked by different types of obese dogs. It's an extension of an earlier Sunday comic, but when it's stretched out over a week gets an incredibly avant-garde feel to it.
Spoiler: show







There was a whole week dedicated to Sudoku and how much Jon sucks at it. Sure it came a few years after Sudoku was huge, but it did have some funny gags. I love the Thursday strip.
Spoiler: show







Also in the files of way overdue references, Garfield and Jon plays video games, but I still thought that was a fun week.
Spoiler: show







Some one-shot strips from the past 16 years that I like
Spoiler: show





Spoiler: show





Spoiler: show











Yeah...my tastes in humor may be different, but you gotta admit those have some more personality than most of the other later comics. I suppose they go along with the "exception" to "solid" categorization, which if you consider how many strips there's been since 1998, it certainly is uncommon / rare indeed.

Finally, a few strips to show off the worst of Garfield in the past 16 years...a few strips with the exact same lines, which weren't even very funny.
Spoiler: show








Oh well. I'll still always love Garfield.
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Old 03-27-2014, 01:55 PM   #16
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Whoa @ those verbatim or near-verbatim repeats at the end. O_o I'm not surprised by the fact that Jim Davis told the same jokes twice: he's the same man with the same brain and the same interests. Over the course of thirty years, it's inevitable that there would be jokes that he would think to tell that, unremembered by him, he'd already told years prior. What I am surprised by is just how identical the jokes are. In some cases word for fucking word identical, same exact characters, same exact circumstances. That's kind of uncanny. To the point that it makes me wonder if he's done it on purpose to see if he gets called out on it. ^^;

A lot of the ones you shared as examples of good comics were indeed good comics, so no need for the "well they're good in my opinion, anyway " defenses. Many of them I wouldn't consider great but you never said they were all great either. I'd agree that they were what constitutes "good ol' Garfield."

But as far as "great" goes, I actually really did like the 1978 Garfield meets 2003 Garfield series. I've never seen it before now. It was quite enjoyable. Kinda sad that it couldn't go on longer, but I guess Davis felt that he'd lose the weekly audience if he kept it up for much longer. (It would probably seem a lot more egotistical and self-serving back in 2003 when it was happening daily than it would feel to us today in 2014 where we look at it in isolation from its daily release schedule, we simply see a tribute to the series, and we want that tribute to be longer.)

The one where Jon (re-)hooks up with Liz was great too. I've read it before but it'd been so long ago that I'd honestly forgotten all of the strips, even the final one. Not to get too overly analytical with what Davis was trying to depict in it, but you could almost say that Ellen would have been in many ways "both Jon Arbuckle's perfect spouse and the antithesis of his perfect spouse." On the one hand, she was dropdead gorgeous (for the Garfield universe), would never tire of Jon, would have only short-lived disappointment in Jon's mishaps since they'd all soon be forgotten about, etc. But at the same time, Ellen's tragic circumstances would be especially bad for Jon. This is a guy who is incredibly lonely and desperately wants to be loved. Ellen, with her crippling amnesia, would be incapable of giving Jon the love he so desperately needs. It's not that all men would be unable to love a woman with amnesia that bad: it's just that Jon, I think, who is too neurotic and too needy, would take it far, far too personally. Along the lines of Fifty First Dates, Jon would end up one of Drew Barrymore's ex-boyfriends who thought he could make the relationship work but just couldn't. That's the core difference between Ellen and Liz: whereas Liz accepts Jon's shortcomings, Ellen doesn't necessarily accept them: she just forgets about them. I don't think a man like Jon could remain happy for very long with a woman who he knows would ordinarily not accept him but is only "putting up with him" because she has a 10-minute memory and constantly forgets his mess-ups. Liz, on the other hand, Jon is aware recognizes his errors. Jon also probably acknowledges that Liz is much smarter than him. So for this beautiful, smart career woman to still be able to accept Jon and to love him in spite of his many flaws ... that has to give Jon the best feeling in the entire world.
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Old 03-28-2014, 04:09 AM   #17
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Yeah. Liz dating Jon is the best thing that's ever happened to him, and frankly in my opinion the best thing that happened to the strip. Her presence adds a lot of variety in between the usual "Garfield is fat, Jon is pathetic" strips. For one thing, it provides an added bit of romance that had been missing for so long. Yeah, a daily comic strip is probably not the best place for good romances, but it's a refreshing change from the usual cynicism of the strip. They're certainly more entertaining than Jon getting rejected over the phone.
Spoiler: show







And while I'll still never see how Liz can get over 25 years of disdain to love Jon for how he is even though he's the mostly the same as he has always been, it's good that she does, although even she does have her limits.
Spoiler: show







This is still one of my favorite strips about their relationship. It's funny because it's true.
Spoiler: show


Anyways, they've been together for about eight years now. It doesn't seem likely that Jon and Liz will get deeper in their relationship. I do want to see them get more serious. Maybe the novelty of Liz would wear off if she becomes a constant presence (although she does make appearances about as often as Odie nowadays) and it probably already has for some people, it could steer the strip in a whol new different direction.
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Old 03-28-2014, 04:31 AM   #18
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ajn, you did an admirable job of finding some funny strips from the modern era. It ain't easy! I hadn't seen that video game arc before, it's pretty good! I love Jon's "Why?" after Garfield chooses to kill him instead of taking the money lol. Plus, that controller! It looks like Sony's proposed boomerang controller design for PS3, which they quickly dropped after it was widely mocked.

I did see the arc with the throwback Garfield. It's funny how 1978 Garfield echoes a lot of our sentiments from this thread. "New and improved? Improved is a matter of opinion" "What's up with your stupid spindly legs?"

Why hasn't this strip been Garfield Minus Garfielded yet?! I laughed my ass off at the one where Jon says, "Life is strange and mysterious" and then his pant leg lifts up by itself.
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Speaking of Garfield Minus Garfield, and related to my comment in the first post about Garfield being a few years away from being the oldest living cat in history ... I just saw this super depressing strip on there, wtf was it even doing there?!
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This one is for DCD, and his newfound love affair with weight training!
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Garfield chose to lift for strength instead of aesthetics, what a mistake! What's unusual about this strip is that Garfield actually uses the correct weightlifting term "press" which is the act of pressing weight above one's head while keeping the legs straight (as in the old Olympic weightlifting event The Clean and Press). The vast majority of people would just use a more casual term like, "Hey Arlene, guess how much weight I can lift" I wonder if Jim Davis lifts?!
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Old 03-30-2014, 08:22 AM   #19
Muyotwo
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Garfield minus Garfield had a really good run, but the Garfield edit series I've enjoyed the most is Silent Garfield, where Garfield's thought bubbles are erased but he remains. As a result, the strip is what you'd actually see if you were looking into the Arbuckle house and saw Jon talking to his cat.

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