On Garfield

I have never liked the comic strip Garfield. It seems I was never young enough to find the antics of the strip’s obese orange tabby funny. And I haven’t gained any ironic appreciation of it over the years, no love-to-hate-it relationship as with Family Circus or Mallard Fillmore.

But after recently checking out Garfield on the web (for no real reason but boredom), I think I may have come up with a reason to appreciate the world of this Monday-hating, lasagna-loving cat and his desperately lonely owner, Jon Arbuckle.

That reason is Garfield.com’s Terms of Service and Conditions of Use page.

Tucked into a corner of the garish mash of color that is Garfield.com’s main page, the link is marked by a cartoon of a smarmy-looking lawyer type, one eyebrow raised. The roll-over text reads “Click for copyright and legal mumbo jumbo.”

But if you do click, what you’ll find seems far from the silly, “square” legalese that such a label seems to suggest. There’s a passage where the user agrees to indemnify Paws, Incorporated. There is a list of vendors unassociated with Paws, Incorporated, including Garfield Visa and Mastercards, Garfield Mobile Content, and something called Typing Tutor. There is a disclaimer that reads “uclick and Paws make no warranty that (i) the Service will meet your requirements; . . . [or that] (iv) the quality of any products, services, information or other material obtained from the Service will meet your expectations.”

Admittedly, this is fairly standard legal language—Garfield.com is surely no more draconian than the average entertainment website when it comes to protecting its brand. But the discrepancy between this sort of thing, as a signifier of a certain status obtained by the Garfield industry, and the humble origins of Jon Davis’s strip about a lazy orange tabby, is striking.

Garfield.com has a “cartoon vault” that contains the first Garfield cartoon. I didn’t remember the character Jon Arbuckle ever being a cartoonist (or Garfield being this grotesque and lumpy), but knowing that this was how the whole thing got started casts a weird light on the complex heights Garfield has reached. My inclination is to believe that Jon Davis started off modestly, was pleasantly surprised by the world’s cheering reception of his strip, and at some point became a kind of prisoner to the success of his creation: “You want to make a third Garfield movie? Well, if you say I’ll make the children cry by saying no, then let’s do it.” In this vision, Davis is the victim of a run-away success, Garfield the comic strip a complicated tangle of personal meanings, emotional resonances, and multiple income streams. Garfield is multivalent, no longer quite under the control of its creator (just as Garfield the cat is not quite under the control of Jon Arbuckle, his owner).

But how likely is this? There have been artists who’ve felt trapped by their creations—see Arthur Conan Doyle, who killed off Sherlock Holmes to work on historical novels, only to bring back the famous sleuth when the public (and publishers) demanded it. I’m thinking too of Ricky Gervais’s second television series, Extras, in which his character, Andy Millman, walks away from a wildly popular, dismally bad (read “hilariously bad”) sitcom he’s no longer proud to be a part of.

But Garfield was never a work of thoughtful art. He’s a lazy cat with a ‘tude. If Davis was happy to sell the licensing rights that inflicted suction cup-pawed Garfield dolls on the world, why suspect he has any regrets about the world of Garfield, Jon, Odie, et al turning into a crass virtual theme park, cross-marketed and multi-branded into unrecognizability?

It’s not a problem the average writer can expect to have, but the notion of one’s creation getting away from an author in this way is weirdly compelling (at least to me). It brings to mind a comic-strip topic on which I could be even more long-winded: in some ways the inverse of Davis and his Garfield Universe is Bill Waterston and his Calvin Pissing on Things Underground. By not licensing Calvin and Hobbes for any sort of merchandise, Waterston unwittingly created those incredibly idiotic decals of Calvin pissing on truck logos, and the use of his and Hobbes’s images on cheap t-shirts for fraternities’ pledge weeks.

Maybe I’m overthinking this but, as silly and bad as I find Garfield to be, looking at his internet headquarters suggests, by way of extreme example, something of the relationship between author and text, and how estranged and distorted such a relationship can become.