Garfield explained

Garfield explained

Inspired by this guy: http://marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com/2008/04/marmadukes-impotent-neighborhood.html. Shitty comics, just like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, have spawned great derived fandom/hatedom material in the past. A more well known example of this phenomenon is Square Root of Minus Garfield (http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/), another I came across recently is xkcd sucks (http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/11/comic-505.html), but obviously there are tons of projects wringing fun out of unfunny source material out there, including my own webcomic Charlie Down. Basic idea of this project is to get me to work on my blog more than 1-2 times a year again.

So ideally I would tackle Marmaduke (since the guy above just randomly dropped off the face off the earth eventually), but I wasn't able to find any online archive of the strip reaching back to the 1950s (or even to the last century at all), and for me beginning at the beginning really is the only way to do things, so the next best thing (or actually one of the few comic strips I even know) is a fellow member of the unholy trinity of pet-related comics... Garfield.

So after this hideously jumbled intro (I got rusty...), let's start with the very first strip. I'm afraid old Garfield is a lil better than what it became after the redesign however... but I really only read the first 5-10 strips so I have no idea what will await me.

So... Garfield explained in the vein of Marmaduke explained by Joe Mathlete.

1978-06-19 - #1

Jon Arbuckle, a cartoonist displaying pupillary distance hinting at a genetic disorder like lobar holoprosencephaly owns (and, in a juridical dilemma, is owned by) an enormously fat and unnaturally orange cat which has cheeks that put a hamster's relative oral storage capacity to shame. Jon's rambling to unseen forces and him imagining his pet talking can only be explained by his devopmental delay.

Note that the lamp from panel 1 goes missing in panel 3, indicating a sloppy start of a cartoon that isn't particularly hard to draw to begin with.