Quiz time. Before we jump in, I’ve taken the text out of three Garfield comic strips. I have a small dialogue between Jon and Garfield in the caption, and you try to figure out which comic strip it was originally in.
Got a guess? Keep it in mind for a minute.
It’s time to reveal the horrible secret that lies hidden within the Garfield comics. Someone has to do it. I know I’m not in much of a position to do this. First of all, I don’t read many comics anymore. The last time I regularly opened up the paper to read any comic has to be when I was in middle school. Secondly, other comics may fall into what I have to say, but Garfield is the target of my post because it genuinely was one of my favorites. Lastly, Garfield is the world’s most highly syndicated comic strip and rakes in up to a billion dollars in merchandise revenue on a yearly basis. It’s a ginormous monster of products, feature films, television shows, and universal humor without controversial or alienating political or social commentary. But this is something I’ve had simmering in me for years, and it finally has to come out.
Garfield is all the same.
Now, Jim Davis is entitled to revisit old territory and rely on some basic tactics to make these strips. After more than 32 years of doing this, he’s drawn at least 11,000 of them–he’s gotta run out of ideas and resort to old tactics some days. I mean, I’ve only done around 45 comics and I find myself struggling for ideas. And I’m not forced to come up with something every day. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that Garfield is the epitome of formulaic humor.
Let’s go back to that quiz from the beginning. Which comic strip did you think is the actual one with that dialogue?
It was the last one.
Actually, I lied. It’s none of them. It came from a different daily strip.
I hope I’m starting to prove a point here. In many ways, the written content of Garfield is highly interchangeable, meaning it can just be chugged out like no one’s business. The strip is a series of one-liners, and creating those can border on being a nearly mechanical process. Is this a cheap scheme or genius? I guess that depends on whether your priority is producing art or making money.
Still, there’s a caveat. I admittedly had to click the “Random Strip” button quite a few times on the Garfield website to get four strips that had the same dialogue structure where Jon speaks in the first panel, there’s silence in the second, and then Garfield retorts in the third. I was fairly selective in choosing these. But as a youngster, I noticed a trend in Garfield comics–one that is so steadfast (especially in recent years) that I can summarize at least 65% of Jim Davis’s body of work in my own three-panel strip. In short, I’ve discovered The Garfield Algorithm.
Study this carefully. This one sticks. It works. Not all the time, obviously, but at least 65% (or let’s just say two-thirds) of the time. I started clicking the “Random Strip” button on Garfield.com some more and got the following comic strips.
Besides July 19, 2006, my algorithm fits everything else. Still, I had a lucky streak where 11 of 12 matched. If you kept clicking, that number would go down. However, I believe that Jim Davis has been revealed–basically, we can all be Jim Davis! Once Jim did a drawing (which I’m sure he can pull off in a few minutes), any of us could take it and add our whimsical one-liner and then make millions as people pay to put the comic on a mousepad or T-shirt. As Captain Planet would say, “The power is yours.”
If you want to see another (much more interesting) deconstruction of Garfield, check out the site garfieldminusgarfield.net. The guy who runs the site takes strips and removes Garfield from them, which typically just leaves Jon looking like an angsty, psychotic loner.
And lastly, I lied twice about the quiz. The real comic with that dialogue was this one.
…or is it?
Rachel
Jul 24, 2010 @ 23:48:07
i dun care if iz all da same dat shit funny erry time i luv garfeel stop hatin
ministerofpain
Jul 25, 2010 @ 00:11:33
psh
Ryan Kirkeby
Jul 28, 2010 @ 15:22:45
You should check out Garfield Minus Garfield sometime.
ministerofpain
Jul 28, 2010 @ 20:39:05
I actually mentioned that site in the post! It’s an awesome site.
He’s OUR Herman. (We are ALL Jim Davis.) « I draw sometimes.
Jul 30, 2010 @ 23:21:05
HP Comic
May 03, 2011 @ 05:45:23
A great analysis. So many comics suffer from the same algoritmic disease, but I guess it is the inherent problem in weekly strips featuring the same characters all the time. Some of the best weekly comics are therefore also those with a more free form, ex. xkcd.
ministerofpain
May 03, 2011 @ 13:34:25
It’s true. Some daily strips suffer from it more than others–Dilbert especially comes to mind. And then there are others like Family Circus which are just single panels but have yet to ever humor me. I think some are much better at not falling into that trap, either because they’re well-written or feature some great art, like Calvin and Hobbes (especially the Sunday strips). But like you said, some of the best comics out there these days are online, like xkcd or the Perry Bible Fellowship.
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Jun 03, 2011 @ 00:26:07
Herman 150 « I draw sometimes.
Aug 16, 2011 @ 20:15:28