aking fun of Garfield at this point is sort of like beating a bottle of glue to show how much you hate horses. Everyone hates it, everyone laments how it was once funny (if they even give it that much credit) and everyone talks about how much the same 3 jokes and lazy animation makes their heads hurt.

Nevertheless, the frequent appearances of unwatchable Garfield: The Movie trailer had me in a Garfieldian mood, and it lead to the following discussion, in the midst of a blog entry.

April 22, 2004

Exhibit B in today's cheesy image series is a pair of comic strips. Malaya and I both love Get Fuzzy, and read it online every day. I think it's the best comic in the newspapers today, and it's often funny, sometimes sentimental and sad, and usually snarky and intelligent. All things that Garfield used to be, before it became a kid-friendly industry, rather than a comic strip with any actual humor or personality.

There's not really any parallel between the strips, other than both having a single guy who owns a talking cat and dog. But since that's about half the comics in the paper at this point, it's not a real strong comparison.

A few days ago, the strip on the 16th was one of the funnier recent Fuzzy's, and we both laughed at it, and for some reason Malaya said something about how utterly unlike Garfield it was. Thusly motivated, I went to the Garfield site and read that day's Garfield, and as the strip was loading (the Garfield site is overly-burdened with unnecessary, childish animations and graphics that greatly slow its loading time) I muttered to myself, "Gee, I wonder if it'll have Garfield on the table, while Jon makes a joke about him eating too much."

I hadn't read a Garfield strip in months, since I last blogged about it, but it's not like you need to read it daily to keep up with the changes in the strip and the radical storylines. It's the same shit ever day, for about 15 years. And sure enough, here's the 4/16/2004 Garfield cartoon.

Pretty much makes you want to kill yourself, doesn't it?

To anyone reading this under the age of 25... I know it's impossible to believe now, but I swear, Garfield was funny, hip, snarky, cynical, and actually sort of radical for the times, back in the early 80s when it was new. It was never as intelligent as Get Fuzzy is now, and it never had that many words, but it was funny, and not just to easily-impressed 9 year olds.

For some contrast, here's the Get Fuzzy from 4/16/2004, that had Malaya and I laughing, and sent me over to see Garfield out of a morbid sense of curiosity.

Could there be more contrast between them? Drawing style, image quality, dialogue, wit, humor, etc.  Even if you don't like Get Fuzzy, just look at how lazy the Garfield strip is. It's basically three drawings in the entire thing. Jon never moves at all, other than opening his mouth. His hair is identical, his shirt is identical, his eyes don't change, he remains expressionless, etc. It's just Xeroxing; the crutch of every bad/slow comic artist. Garfield is a Xerox himself, with just a different head in shot one.  The arm on the table never changes, and the last 2 panels are identical in every way, other than the dialogue bubbles.

Compare to Get Fuzzy, which is actually drawn by an artist, not just slapped down from pre-drawn figures. There's a long shot, then a close up of the little mouse, showing him in 10x more detail, and from a different, 3D angle. Then the last panel is a medium range shot, with both figures changed in angle from the first and second panel. Also, the hairs change, there's depth and shading and gradients, and so on.

I guess my point here is that 1) Garfield really sucks, 2) Get Fuzzy is roxor, and 3) You don't notice just how lazy and awful Garfield has gotten until you compare it directly to a comic strip that's drawn by someone who still actually cares about his craft.

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