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On alternating Thursdays, Jennifer M. Babcock reviews and recommends comic strips available in print and on the web.

I know I’ve recently talked about Garfield in this blog but a recent comics discovery compels me to turn our attention back to this sassy, lasagna-loving cat. While going down the list of comics syndicated on GoComics.com a while back, I found a strip called “Life According to Garfield.”

Actually, I shouldn’t call it a strip. Technically, “Life According to Garfield” is a panel comic, meaning that it consists of a single image with an accompanying caption. Other examples of panel comics include “Love is…,” “The Far Side,” and almost any New Yorker cartoon.

Normally I would feel bad about posting a really scathing review about another creator’s work, but since it’s Jim Davis, who doesn’t even draw Garfield or any of its sister strips anymore (or at least very very rarely), I don’t feel as bad about it.

For those who were unaware, Garfield is the product of “the Man” – The Corporate Machine. Garfield, I think, was always intended to be a product of “the Man.” When Davis created this sarcastic feline he intended it to be a “good, marketable character.” Today, in 2009, Davis may help with some of the storylines and rough sketches for Garfield, but it is my understanding that he spends more of his time managing the business and merchandising of Garfield through his company Paws, Inc.

And he’s certainly done a good job. Garfield is the most widely syndicated comic in the world (interestingly, however, it has not been able to gain a foothold in Japan), produced TV shows, movies, mugs, t-shirts, thousands of car window plushies, and 3 different comics (“Garfield”, “Garfield Minus Garfield”, and now “Life According to Garfield”).

I’m not going to diss Davis’s commercial success. Who wouldn’t want a commercial empire?

No, this blog is about how much “Life According to Garfield” sucks @$$.

First of all, “Life According to Garfield” reads more like designs for posters and mugs than an actual comic. In fact, I believe many of the readers (based on the comments left) wish these were posters and mugs. (I know – I can’t believe it either.) Let’s look at a recent one: Odie is standing on his hind legs, arms spread wide. He is smiling and his disproportionately large tongue flops out of his mouth while a single drop of saliva, indicated through a blue tear drop shape, falls. His butt is turned to his left side as if to show that he is a sassy, show-stopping dog. To the right, Garfield is shown standing on his hind legs, his left arm behind his back and his right hand pointing toward Odie (though Garfield’s right finger overlaps over Odie’s left cheekbone which would normally suggest that he is pointing to something beyond the panel boundary). Garfield wears a full grin on his face, as if to tell us that he’s been a big smart ass once again. Below all this, a single caption: “If you want to appear smarter, hang around someone stupider.”

I suppose this is a good comic in that there is good interplay between word and image (we know that Garfield is the one that appears smarter because he’s the one doing the pointing. Nonetheless, the punchline itself is lame, overdone, and cliché. I guess this is kind of how regular Garfield strips have been of late, and to “Life According to Garfield”’s credit, at least its lameness is captured concisely in a neat, concise panel, which means it wastes less of my time.

Here’s another example (I’ll spare you the formal analysis this time):

Look! It’s an edgy version of “Ziggy.”

So far, “Life According to Garfield” has gotten a lot of positive feedback from readers on the GoComics.com site, which is simultaneously surprising… and unsurprising. It seems that the comics that do best on these big syndication websites (GoComics.com, Comics.com) are the safe, familiar comics that we all grew up with. The most successful newspaper comics are the ones that do not offend (with the exception of political comics such as Doonesbury and Mallard Fillmore, but that’s a blog topic that we’ll have to save for another day) – they have to have mass appeal. “Life According to Garfield” certainly has that. While I might not find it particularly funny, I can’t say that it offends me (except maybe my good taste :P).

Anyway, for people who share my darker sense of humor we still have “Garfield Minus Garfield” (also distributed by Paws, Inc.). I suppose the GoComics summary for “Garfield” is spot on then… Garfield truly is “a cat for all seasons.”

Jennifer M. Babcock holds her MA in art history and is currently pursuing her doctorate in Egyptology from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she is also known as a comics scholar. A creator herself, she is the artist and writer behind C’est La Vie, which is syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and available at http://www.gocomics.com/cestlavie.

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