I realize you’re tempted to say, “One is an essential and riotously funny character in one of the all-time great office satires and the other is a dumb cat who has somehow mined comic gold out of endless jokes about the same few topics: hating Mondays, loving lasagne, being fat and lazy, cruelty to dogs and sarcasm about his lame owner.” But no, seriously, what is the BIG difference between Garfield and Dogbert if you examine them within the context of their own worlds?
Dogbert talks. Garfield does not.
When Dilbert, the rather sad and pathetic engineer bachelor, comes home to complain about his lousy job and poor social life to his pet, Dogbert belittles him vocally and they hold conversations.
When Jon Arbuckle, the rather sad and pathetic cartoonist bachelor, comes home to complain about his lousy job and poor social life to his pet, Garfield thinks up witty sarcastic responses in thought balloons. Jon doesn’t hear Garfield, although often he can tell what Garfield is thinking due to body language or he responds to Garfield’s inattentiveness. (And sometimes, the strip strays off concept for a while and Jon seems to understand Garfield as though he were talking.)
In other words, Jon is coming home and holding one-sided conversations with his cat. He isn’t hearing anything. To see what Jon is seeing, you’d have to remove his thought balloons.
The folks over at Truth and Beauty Bombs started doing that in a forum thread. The originator was “MackJ” who stated that Garfield becomes a “surrealist” comic, although really it’s becoming far more real. This is Jon’s reality, and he is a sad schmuck. A cat who loves lasagne? That’s surrealist!
Here’s just a sample of the strips, culled from the thread which goes on for 19 pages. To see more, check out the full thread. Neil Gaiman himself enjoys the TBB versions of Garfield.
You may also like Ted Mills’ “Farfield“, in which the silent Garfield is replaced with a realistic cat.
A realistic who never sleeps, always sits, never lays prone, never blinks, never moves, and resembles the cats of our world more than Jon Arbuckle does.
I don’t think Farfield works; it’s creepy that the cat never moves and always stares unblinkingly at us. It pulls me too far out to see a cartoon Jon and a “real” Garfield to get back into how pathetic Jon is.
Although seeing it from Jon’s POV does make it funny again.
Honestly: there is nothing wrong with Garfield. I have no critical ideas against it!
I’ve read so many strips for so long from so young and in its earliest days… it got old!
Dilbert got old, too.
That’s, like, Weeping Gorilla-grade pathos. Strong stuff.