"Cartoon cat’s gender identity launched a Wikipedia war"

[ericbarbour]

Everything about this is stupid. If it was intended to be "humorous", it fails.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/com ... 624be9bf1b

So stupid, it was posted on Meat-a-filter, and triggered a whinefest:

http://www.metafilter.com/165406/Garfields-a-boy-right

[Flip Flopped]

Everything about this is stupid. If it was intended to be "humorous", it fails.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/com ... 624be9bf1b

So stupid, it was posted on Meat-a-filter, and triggered a whinefest:

http://www.metafilter.com/165406/Garfields-a-boy-right

Wikipedia is proof that bored people who have nothing better to do will cause problems on the internet.

[Strelnikov]

Everything about this is stupid. If it was intended to be "humorous", it fails.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/com ... 624be9bf1b

So stupid, it was posted on Meat-a-filter, and triggered a whinefest:

http://www.metafilter.com/165406/Garfields-a-boy-right

Wikipedia is proof that bored people who have nothing better to do will cause problems on the internet.

Garfield is Seinfeld's predecessor, the cartoon strip about nothing. Back in the '70s Jim Davis saw that simple, stupid strips like Ziggy were doing well, so he concocted the formula of a man, his snide/lazy cat, a roommate, and that guy's dumb dog. The roommate vanished early on, so it's now the man, his pets, and the cat's love of laziness and Italian food. The formula is so simple, when the cartoon was made into a series of animated specials and then a long-running CBS Saturday-morning cartoon, they had to add to the cast of characters to keep the affair from looking too sparse, so you got Jon's (the man) family, Garfield (the cat) meeting his relatives, the female vet Jon wants to date, etc.

Jim Davis, the artist/writer of the strip, owns all of it through his Paws, Inc. company, which is why the CBS show incorporated characters from U.S. Acres, a comic strip Davis did that appeared and disappeared from newspapers in a three-year span in the late '80s. Because Garfield does not reference current events 99.99999 percent of the time, it allegedly takes Davis a fortnight to draw a years' worth of strips in one go, all from his drawing board in his house.
This guy is literally living off the 1980s fame of the strip.

Of all the schlocky newspaper comic strips that sank the artform into tedium, I have to blame Garfield as the creator of a space for lazy crap like Dilbert, Baby Blues, Marvin, and the Garfield ripoff Heathcliff.

The only good things that Garfield gave us were the Photoshop reworkings starting with Garfield minus Garfield and Lasagna Cat, where people act out these strips in costume showing how crappy they truly are.

[ericbarbour]

Of all the schlocky newspaper comic strips that sank the artform into tedium, I have to blame Garfield as the creator of a space for lazy crap like Dilbert, Baby Blues, Marvin, and the Garfield ripoff Heathcliff.

The only good things that Garfield gave us were the Photoshop reworkings starting with Garfield minus Garfield and Lasagna Cat, where people act out these strips in costume showing how crappy they truly are.

And if you said that in a major publication, Davis would probably have his lawyers after you. He loves to sue to protect his "nothing" comic strip. At least he used to---Lasagna Cat is still on YT thus I can presume he's given up. The money is not an issue anymore.....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... field.html
"Garfield products—sold in 111 countries—rake in between $750 million and $1 billion each year."

[Strelnikov]

<snip>

The only good things that Garfield gave us were the Photoshop reworkings starting with Garfield minus Garfield and Lasagna Cat, where people act out these strips in costume showing how crappy they truly are.

And if you said that in a major publication, Davis would probably have his lawyers after you. He loves to sue to protect his "nothing" comic strip. At least he used to---Lasagna Cat is still on YT thus I can presume he's given up. The money is not an issue anymore.....

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... field.html
"Garfield products—sold in 111 countries—rake in between $750 million and $1 billion each year."

He doesn't go after Fatal Farm because it would make him look bad, and "inoffensive" is his watchword.....also that Slate article is from 2004 so the numbers have probably changed, up or down I have no idea. It is nice that they point out that Davis was inducted into the Licensing Merchandiser's Hall of Fame and not the one run by the International Museum of Cartoon Art. It's also wonderful to find out that I was dead wrong about how Davis was doing the strip in the 2000's; by handing off the art to employees, he has fallen into the lazy rut Al Capp made for himself on Lil' Abner back in the 1950s.

Let me be clear, Garfield is not the beginning of newspaper cartoon badness; that started when the space for comics got smaller and smaller, and you saw a lot more of the three-panel gag strips, and many of them lasted long enough to become "zombie" strips where the creator handed it off to somebody else. A good example would be the two strips Johnny Hart worked on, B.C. and Wizard of Id; Hart had created B.C. in the late 1950s, and he and Brant Parker created/wrote/drew Wizard of Id from 1964 onward. Brant Parker handed the comic strip off to his son Jeff in the mid-90s with Johnny Hart still grinding out B.C. by himself. Now Brant Parker and Johnny Hart are dead, but the two strips live on drawn by a crew of four artists, all members of Hart's family except for Jeff Parker. Nobody picked up Peanuts after Charles Schultz died!

[ericbarbour]

Let me be clear, Garfield is not the beginning of newspaper cartoon badness; that started when the space for comics got smaller and smaller, and you saw a lot more of the three-panel gag strips, and many of them lasted long enough to become "zombie" strips where the creator handed it off to somebody else. A good example would be the two strips Johnny Hart worked on, B.C. and Wizard of Id; Hart had created B.C. in the late 1950s, and he and Brant Parker created/wrote/drew Wizard of Id from 1964 onward. Brant Parker handed the comic strip off to his son Jeff in the mid-90s with Johnny Hart still grinding out B.C. by himself. Now Brant Parker and Johnny Hart are dead, but the two strips live on drawn by a crew of four artists, all members of Hart's family except for Jeff Parker. Nobody picked up Peanuts after Charles Schultz died!

Hah. The newspaper business has got itself far worse problems than badly-made comic strips.....

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/201 ... _1950.html

http://newspaperdeathwatch.com/

[Strelnikov]

Hah. The newspaper business has got itself far worse problems than badly-made comic strips.....

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/201 ... _1950.html

http://newspaperdeathwatch.com/

The sad, shitty shape of newspapers is both inside and outside the bounds of this thread, because if the papers were doing well, the comics wouldn't suck as bad.