I'm honestly really confused. Like, every single strip I've seen is just so incredibly unfunny. But apparently it is or at least was incredibly popular?? How exactly did it become so popular? Are there actually people who are like "ah Garfield, I love Garfield so much, I can't wait for the next Garfield to drop" or was it like something people saw and shrugged and said "alright" and moved on?
I actually searched in Google to find people posting actually funny Garfield strips, and at least in most of the ones people were bringing up you could see where the joke was supposed to be, or there was an actual attempt at a joke. In most of them. When the "cream of the crop" only "mostly" passes as a joke then there's a problem.
Of all the "best" ones, there was a total of 4 which... Weren't funny exactly but at least they actually had a punchline that was kinda cute I guess. This was the best I managed to find: http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/1988/ga881207.gif
Yeah, that. That's the most amazing I could find. Both the movies were like 100 times better than anything in the strips, and that says a lot. I seriously can't understand it and because Garfield was never popular here, I don't personally know anyone who read that shit, and I can't help but feel like it's all a big joke or something lol
Garfield Minus Garfield is actually a good idea. Who knew he could have made the strips better by putting in even LESS effort.
That was actually the original intention of the strip, Jon being alone, rarely going out because he's a freelance cartoonist. Garfield was always just supposed to be a regular cat, but thinks about snarky comments. That intention gets obfuscated when Garfield starts standing on two legs and starts going with Jon everywhere, even when it makes no sense for a cat to come with him.
Well I guess when you're in elementary school you laugh at literally anything if it's kinda colorful.
before I saw a colored Garfield comic, I misinterpreted their eyes closing as their pupils rolling into the back of their head like they were possessed or something.
Holy shit I just googled it, you're fucking right lol that's exactly how it looks
Same. I will never watch it again though. I am leaving that nostalgia-stone unturned.
Apparently Garfield became really popular after the collections of strips in book form began to be made, since they were cheap gifts that you could get for someone easily
Garfield was never funny. It was specifically made as a marketable vessel to be as generically appealing as possible for syndication, media rights, and merchandise.
Kind of like that addage George Lucas is a toymaker first and a filmmaker second. Garfield just became recognizable because of a massive coordinated effort of the media marketing machine. Jim Davis created Garfield purely to mimic the syndication success of Peanuts, and Charles Schultz was the cartoonist who convinced Davis to draw Garfield to walk on two feet instead of four.
Paws Inc, the parent company of the Garfield Enterprise, is worth around $800 million dollars today. Garfield was never funny.
Also:
The movie won’t take the nation by storm—in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly—but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD and then be remembered only by the small sample of tots in the viewing audience who turn into ironic hipsters during their college years.
This article predicted the future and me in particular.
Shouldn't making you laugh be kind of a selling point tho? That's what weirds me out, how this is so popular and not anything else.
i was 8. I don't even think I laughed at it then. I just liked collecting things.
</irony>
the 80s-90s TV cartoons were not nearly as terrible as the strips and I think that dichotomy is where the weird love/hate for Garfield comes from. watch Garfield in Paradise, it's kinda funny (also very
90s80s racist)<irony>
I loved it when I was a kid, and nowadays it's just one of those comfy nostalgic things that isn't all that great but I enjoy anyway, like Pokemon.
I always got one of the compilation books for Christmas or my birthday. Read them cover to cover because damn is Garfield some simple fun.
Still preferred Calvin and Hobbes, but I read all those like 3 times over and there were essentially infinite garfield books so my parents always had something to get.
Funnily enough, the reason you always hear that he hated Mondays was that he must have been shot on a Monday. But actually, he was shot on a Saturday, and he died like a month later, and that was on a Monday.
i read a lot of garfield when i was a kid, so the strips make me pretty nostalgic and i unironically enjoy them because of that. i still have a pile of garfield books and magazines somewhere in my house from when i was 8. of course now as an adult i can look back and realize that most of them aren't exactly good, but i still like them. for me it transcended into absurdist comedy gold when garfield eats became a thing
The jokes were simple enough for everyone to understand, and the character was ubiquitous because Jim Davis understood how to market. I have heard that he is in the marketing hall of fame, but not the cartoonist's hall of fame. He even had the foresight to ease back on exposure for Garfield, because he was able to anticipate that everyone would get sick of the character if it was seen in too many places at once.
He convinced enough people, such as myself, that the strip was clever, that we kept going through the motions for years.
I have heard that he is in the marketing hall of fame, but not the cartoonist’s hall of fame.
Idk if that's a thing but it definitely sounds like it makes sense.
I don't think it was ever that funny. But it was better than almost all of the other newspaper comics, and that was enough for most people.
But it was better than almost all of the other newspaper comics
There was worse???
Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side and to a lesser extent Foxtrot are the only newspaper comics that have ever been funny
