Flip Flopped wrote: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.