Does the comic strip Garfield make anyone else out there mad? I used to love Garfield, but now it’s the same thing everyday! Garfield is always standing or lying down on what appears to be a table(?) and Jon just stands there complaining. I mean there is no detail in the drawings, nothing in the background, and all three frames are almost identical. Remember when Jon used to actually go places with Garfield, and the scenery was insteresting to look at, and there were other characters? Oh yeah, and the jokes are terrible! It is always something like this:
Jon: Hey Garfield, another girl laughed at me again.
Garfield: Can’t you see I’m sleeping.
Jon: Gee, what a surpise.
Okay, so this might be a slight exageration, but I said SLIGHT! What has happened to this strip? Maybe it’s just me, but I feel it’s time for Jim Davis to call it quits. Does anyone else out there agree or disagree with me?
Tell the truth: you dug up a time capsule from 1983 and this rant was inside so you decided to post it. Is Garfield even still in syndication? I remembered it sucking really bad in the mid-80’s after a year or two of intense popularity, but I haven’t really thought about it since.
Next, I think you should take a strong stand on whether the A-Team is believable or not. “Ever notice how the machine gun bullets always hit the dirt right near people’s feet? What’s up with that?”
Last week the strip marked its 25th anniversary. There must be some fans out there. Jim Davis recently pulled the plug on his Mr. Potato Head strip. Perhaps he’ll have more time to dream up better gags for old Garf.
Way, way back, I saw an interview with Bill Waterson and rather than say something bad about Jim Davis he said: “Jim Davis is…consistent.” Still true today.
maybe Garfield should eat something. Has there been a lasagna in the strip lately?
What I’d really like to see is for Garfield, and every other strip that has long outlived its usefulness, be taken from their current cartoonist and given to someone else who would take the strip in as weird and twisted a new direction as possible, or at least kill everybody off entertainingly.
I think the problem is that Garfield is a business. I saw a picture many years ago of the people who work on Garfield. There were 7 or 8 people in the picture.
There’s someone to think of the stories and someone else to do the drawings. I don’t remember what the other jobs were, but I remember being amazed at the time that they needed people to do each of these “jobs.”
When you look back at the early strips, you see one person being very creative and funny. Then Garfield became a phenomenon and Jim Davis basically hired a committe to write the strip for him.
I have to say it still makes me smile occasionally. There was one about a year ago where Jon says something like, “my teeth caught fire while I was flossing my teeth.” But for the most part the strips are very bland now.
If you don’t like the usual Garfield you can try this random Garfield strip generator, it takes panels from Garfield strips and puts them together radomly (as the name suggests) to generate a new series that is, in my opinion anyway, funnier than some of the proper cartoons.
I’m a fan overall. The problem is, the strips rarely venture off the kitchen counter. The TV specials and TV series were fun. So I’m looking forward to the movie.