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Behold, the archetypical Garfield strip! Enterprising Photoshop-wielding readers of this feature have already had their fun creating Garfield strips that encapsulate the comic’s essential blankness (though this one appears to be the only one still online). Here, however, we have a strip that features no visual movement whatsoever. None. The question then becomes: why even bother having separate panels? Why not one big panel with a chipmunk-cheeked Garfield in the center and a long thought balloon above, big enough to contain this strip’s allegedly humorous text? Is there something about the repetition of identical images that’s supposed to tell us something about the passage of time, about comic iconography? Or does it just suck?

Speaking of sucking: if you’re just going to be using the Cut and Paste features of your design program to reproduce three panels, you really ought to use the time you’ve freed up to come up with a good joke. Sadly, the Jim Davis Fun Time Factory chose not to take this path. In protest, I’ve chosen to replace the text with a classic anecdote from the Truly Tasteless Jokes series.

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Garfield, 2/7/05

Sally Forth signals her understanding and appreciation of her own wit or that of others with a look that one of my brilliant readers refers to as “sly”; but Garfield proves to be the Zen master of the minimalist reaction shot. See how Jon, his eyelids heavy with ennui, reacts to Garfield’s typically wacky demand: he doesn’t go overboard letting us know the punchline has happened, he just tips his head back about a quarter of an inch and moves his eyes slightly to the right. Why hit everybody over the head with it? It’s not a Three Stooges routine.

There’s just something about Garfield that gets everybody up and agitated, whether they’re combining him with Satan, running him over with a van, or doing alarming, freaky things that you really have to see to appreciate. (Thanks to Nicholas, Lynn, and Michal, respectively, for the tips. Folks, we’re all gonna get sued.)

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Garfield, 10/18/04

Marmaduke, 10/18/04

Regular readers of this feature know of my affection for theme days here, so you can imagine my joy when I saw not one but two dancing animal jokes in today’s comics section. I was a bit stymied at first, though, because I couldn’t really think of anything funny to say on the subject. Then I thought to myself, “Hey, these cartoonists couldn’t either!”

Zing! I tell ya, this stuff practically writes itself, especially when I’m being needlessly cruel.

OK, let’s find something nice to say … um … well. I think the expression on Jon’s face is funny in the third panel of Garfield, though he should really be inured to bizarre cat behavior at this point. I also like the clothes that male-Marmaduke-owner and female-Marmaduke-owner (do these people have names?) wear, especially the hat on the former and the chunky-patterned dress on the latter. They live in America, circa 1967, and they’re adults and all, but they aren’t quite square.

On the note of comic-page animals, I should point out that I went over to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (is there a more mellifluous name in the annals of American journalism?) Website to download these two comics and found that neither of these mainstays grace the pages of the Pacific Northwest’s most prominent daily. I had to reassure many anxious readers that my recent dream about moving to Seattle was in fact just a dream, but the idea that I could live in a land where I get to read Mark Trail and not Marmaduke in the paper is an intriguing one. If only it didn’t rain 320 days a year.

There’s some more dancing animal action over in the Peanuts rerun today as well. So why didn’t it get put up here with these other two? Well, mostly because, as usual, it’s funny. Oops, there I go again! Best stop now before I cross the line into unpleasantly hostile. You all are just lucky you didn’t get another dose of Mary Worth. All I have to say is: “Save it for the judge!“