THE GREY PLANE

Why the internet can’t stop trying to parody Garfield, and why it fails

The last few years have seen such online preoccupations as Rickrolling, lolcats and machinima, but strangest of all has been the internet’s obsession with altering the daily newsprint comic Garfield. No other comic, mainstays of the dwindling paper sepulchers hidden between Business and Sports, such as Cathy, Foxtrot, The Family Circus, The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, even Dilbert, have been so detourned and satirized online.

Wait, you shout, hysterical at the keyboard. You’re trying to tell me that Garfield is satirized more online than The Family Circus? I win, you yell, sweaty hands swabbing your computer like greasy coldcuts on glass. Except I didn’t say that, or not exactly, so I win on a technicality.

But you’re right – take a look at The Nietzsche Family Circus or The Dysfunctional Family Circus, or hell, watch “Family Guy” or run your own damn google search and you’ll find hundreds more that are direct satirizations. Or try Cathy – there’s a satire by Achewood , and a few more out there, but Cathy is more ridiculed than it is parodied.

There’s a difference between these parodies and how online communities have reworked Garfield. The Family Circus has only two or three prominent satires, and they are direct responses to the conservatism and near Puritanism of the comics – they are angry retorts to the impossibility and inanity of the characters, plot and humor. Cathy’s satire is the same way – the humor is in parodying how Cathy’s life is idiotically consumed by guilt (a little research will show that one of the most documented aspects of Cathy is what the author (also, in a bizarre twist, named Cathy) refers to as the Four Basic Guilt Groups) and her ubiquitous ACK! (I don’t really know how she even says ACKKKKKKK, but I’m not a cicada.)

Then why am I singling out Garfield, surely it’s got direct parodies too. And yeah, it does, but in very unpredictable ways such that classifying them satire or parody is a little fuzzy. Maybe the most direct would be Barfield or Fuckfield, which depend largely on scatological and sexual humor. But there isn’t really anything about that in the original Garfield comics. Yeah, animals poop, and Garfield had a litter box and Jon has admitted to wanting to kiss Liz (or any other bitch, yeah!), but the discussions on these fit nicely within normal conversation. Cats don’t like full litter boxes and dudes (especially one as naive as Jon), would not immediately say they’re looking forward to screwing a girl – a kiss and a date are more likely. So what’s the satire here if it’s not against Garfield? That’s out of the scope of this essay, but I don’t think it’s far off to imagine any public figure sucking cock in the newspaper is so offensive that it’s bound to be funny. It seems that these parodies are using Garfield to satirize something larger than just the comic. Whereas the Cathy or The Family Circus satires are aimed at the comics they came from, the Garfield satires are used as a vehicle to go beyond the comic – the parodies are a means, not an end.

And things get weirder. There’s a slew (a SLEW!) of other parodies that are even more difficult to classify as such. Even the creators of these satires don’t quite know what to call them. Hell, since we’re talking about the internet here, google “Garfield remix” vs. “Garfield parody” and “Garfield satire” and you’ll see that the first search gets more hits than the other two combined. And they come in legions. Most famous of them is Garfield Minus Garfield, which rose to such prominence that even the New York Times took notice. Note that even in that article, the words satire and parody never appear.

But there’s more. An incomplete list follows: Lasagna Cat and Silent Garfield and Garfield as a Real Cat and Garfield Variations and Garfield Randomizer and The Death of Garfield and Nothing Garfield and Permanent Monday and Garkov and Not Garfield (by Anticon artist Doseone, no less) and I don’t know how many more. All of these, however, share a similar approach in that they cannot properly be called satires. They’re saying nothing about Garfield, and they certainly aren’t mocking it. Instead, they are new creations, remixes of the comic in which themes that were overlooked or invisible within the comic are brought to the surface.

Many of these only address satire, if there is any, by simply inserting absurdity into the comic. It’s a stretch to say that this addition is satirizing the mundanity and repetition of Garfield, because there are plenty of other comics who deserve this derision more. Why else does The Onion, the most popular print satire that exists in the nation, run prints of The Cranks? If boring is the issue, why aren’t there comics where Marmaduke is replaced by Immanuel Kant, or why hasn’t anyone made a comic of Hi and Lois in which all the dialogue is replaced by chatroom logs? Even if these comics did exist, they would still be in the minority of absurdist remixed comics, Garfield Minus Garfield alone eclipsing them in popularity and number.

The variety of these new Garfield comics astound. We’ve got comics wherein all dialogue is replaced with Markov chains, comics with no dialogue, comics with Garfield as a real cat, comics without Garfield at all, even a blog that breaks down each panel into deep analysis of the action, the art, and the comic’s effect on society.

So why the hell does Garfield – a comic that I thought was mediocre when I was nine – attract this kind of attention, where even Peanuts satires are either idle musings (What if Picasso had made Peanuts! ZOMG!) or are asking what would happen if Charlie Brown beat the shit out of Lucy? Why has Garfield attracted so much attention from (ugh, I’m saying it) Post-Modernists, Dadaists and detournement…ers? No other nationally syndicated comic has inspired so many original recreations, but why? We’ve decided (You’re a part of this. It’s too late for you now) that it’s not due to the comic being boring and it’s not because the comic inspires conservative values. So, what?

Advertising! As silly as it might seem to bring up Jim Davis’s work prior to creating Garfield, the fact that Jim Davis’s first job was at an advertising agency first seems pretty damn relevant to the primary feature of Garfield – it’s empty.

All widespread general population advertising is about lack. An advertiser who wants to target everyone (not a niche market or the ‘hip kids’ who use ‘apostrophes’) will see just a brand – a logo and nothing more – as his cream dream. To appeal to everyone, the ideal ad will have one argument (buy our shit) and will be void of anything else – controversy, scandal, occult knowledge – specialization of any sort. Jim Davis created the ideal pop comic by following this same logic, making Garfield accessible while avoiding scandalous or offensive topics and imagery, and jettisoning any substance that was not “read this comic” (buy our shit). There is so little substance in Garfield, in fact, that Jim Davis himself has very little involvement in it – he signs the comic which is created by an enigmatic business called Paws Inc. which generates between $750 million to $1 billion a year – far more than is possible from simply selling the comics and requires a great deal of merchandising. (It’s hard to think of a more creatively vapid product than merchandising – remove the character from all context and make it a lone symbol that cannot make any statement besides what the viewer already knows. Merchandising creates money by selling the product and creating a reminder of the product, guaranteeing a double return with no creative or very little creative input, like putting Odie in a cyute widdle hat.) Hell, Davis himself told the Washington Post in 1982 that creating Garfield was “a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character.” There is no argument in Garfield, no statement beyond popularity.

There have been many essays written about Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts capturing the alienation of children from adults or chronicling the eventual (fictional) fall from grace that is puberty, and feminists have torn apart Cathy and don’t get me stated on what social critics have done to The Family Circus, but there aren’t any essays about how deep or destructive Garfield is because Garfield says nothing about anything universal. Jon is lonely, Garfield is hungry and Odie is dumb, but there are men, cats and dogs that aren’t. There’s not even an angry NAACP exasperated at how few black people there are. There is so little here that the only thing to read into Garfield is what is read onto Garfield.

It is the very absence of substance that makes Garfield so useful as materials that can be used to examine language, comics, loneliness and psychology. With no comment to critique or twist, any comment made is valid. This lack of statement is precisely what allows the most freedom in recreation, remixing and appropriation.

I’ll take this one step further and ask you what would happen if these disparate comics were all seen as written by one author or seen as one show? What essays might be written about that, I don’t know. But what is clear is that Garfield invites Dadaism, detournement and absurdity like no other comic, and the only reason it does so is that the only argument it has ever made is no argument at all.