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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!“

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Garfield, 9/7/04

Oh, that Garfield! With the laziness and the obesity and the … um … hey hey. One of the more opaque aspects of this cat’s personality is the arbitrariness of his bloodthirstiness. He smashes spiders with a particular savagery; but, while he doesn’t seem to like mice very much, he can’t be bothered to do them any harm. My cat has the opposite tendencies — she’s killed mice, but insects don’t interest her — so maybe this is a realistic insight into cat psychology. Or maybe it’s incredibly lazy writing. You make the call.

Incidentally, I think one of the things that Americans hold against the French is their aura of cultural snobbery. In the interest of promoting international friendship, I’d like to point out that, during my recent trip to Paris, ads for Garfield: The Movie (or, as they call it there, Garfield: Le Film) were literally everywhere. If we take density of advertising as an indication of importance (and I can see no reason why we shouldn’t), then this movie is considered to be the most important film release there since Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.

And yes, that is the emaciated face of an Olsen twin peeking in from the left.