I like the comic timing. It’s a conversation, not a gag-a-day.
I’ve heard it suggested that Rob is in fact a paranoid schizophrenic, imagining all of his dialogue with Bucky and Satchel. That’s also why he has so few interactions with other human beings.
Remember how in the early days of the strip there were other human characters, like Rob’s friend from work, and his dad? And there were actually scenes that took place outside the apartment? I wonder if Conley feels that he has refined the strip by restricting the action to the apartment and focusing on just the three main characters (with only a handful of other wacky animals as occasional guests). I’m afraid that, for me, he has impoverished it.
Reading GF is too tiring for my eyes (as is Pearls Before Swine), so I skip it. I don’t know if it’s the font size, the ink/size ratio, my aging eyes, or some such thing, but it has too little payoff for the amount of effort it takes to read it. Even the current Boogers week is really ink-heavy and hard to digest.
Well, comics have become a row of postage stamps ill-suited to anything but a few sketchy outlines and minimal word-balloons. I’m willing to make the effort on the strips that reach for the higher artistic plane of the days when they actually had a couple of square inches to work with.
Sadly, Garfield was actually hilarious for about a year. Garfield looked a little too much like B. Kliban’s cat, but he also behaved like a cat. After a year, Davis ran out of cat jokes, Garfield got a neoteny make-over, and we have the present strip. It fell unbelievably far.
I’d debate that. As I said, Davis later (maybe 10 years on?) admitted all the things I listed - basically, that he coldly analyzed the market and delivered the maximum money-making combination, without any slightest thought of art or expression or humor or “fulfillment.” It showed from day one.
I think the only reason you might think the early days were funny was because all lame jokes are funny… once. By the umpteenth lasagna or laziness or Jon’s-stupid or Odie’s-stupider iteration, it’s just not funny any more and you have to consider why it was humorous in the first place.
A lot of long-running strips recycle material, sometimes just as tediously… but I don’t know any other strip creator who openly admits they’re doing the least work that will bring them the maximum returns in subsidiary marketing. Garry Trudeau is perhaps the closest in a corporate-cartooning sense, but at least he strains to make the strip continuously interesting, relevant and even valuable in a social-commentary way. (Strains… succeeds far less than in earlier days.)