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.

In any event, check out the skit on YouTube.

Also, in this moment of pre-Oscar buzz (when the stars are, I’m sure, indulging in applying a last-minute sheen of spray on tan), I predict Daniel Day-Lewis taking the statue for best actor and No Country For Old Men (a line from a Yeats poem, by the way) winning for best picture. Although Michael Clayton is there, lurking, with its fluent, masterful storytelling.

Tina Fey took on the trials and tribulations (and costs and gains) of the writers’ strike in her opening monologue. I wonder if the Oscars will do the same. It seems necessary because pop-culture continues to shift to its new online habitat and away from its old haunts. These are issues that concern us all, as writers, and as watchers of (many) TV shows.

The 1987 adolescents-battling-monsters classic The Monster Squad has just been released on a special 20th Anniversary DVD.

The film mostly lives on in memory for a scene where one of the monster-hunting kids kicks the Wolfman in a most sensitive region; the Wolfman doubles over in pain, and the kid, who’s shocked to see a supernatural being hurt by such a juvenile tactic, says, “Wolfman’s got nards!” My brother and I would use the phrase pretty much all the time; I don’t really think “nards” had any meaning before The Monster Squad, but it sure did afterwards.

Two Pittsburgh tie-ins to the movie and that magical phrase:

One, Pittsburgh’s Unicorn Mountain, a collective of artists, earlier this year published Wolfman’s Got Nards: A Compendium of New American Monsters in collaboration with another Pittsburgh entity, Encyclopedia Destructica.

Two, the writer of the Monster Squad screenplay, Shane Black, is a Pittsburgh native. He’s got quite the resume: Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight are all Shane Black scripts. However, film historians will no doubt remember Black largely on the strength of The Monster Squad.

Okay, perhaps not. But apparently the making-of feature on the anniversary DVD is longer than the film itself, so someone is taking The Monster Squad pretty seriously. (Either that or, as the AV Club review suggests, DVD extras are getting out of control.)

-Adam

But there is a special place in my personal pantheon for the George Plimpton of bums. He has the grayish-white hair, patrician face and carriage of the late George Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review and author of such gonzo sports journalism works as Paper Lion and The Bogey Man. He is shorter, though, a little stouter, and in general doesn’t seem to be in as bright a mood as Plimpton often broadcast to the world. I see him in my neighborhood and in Oakland, where Pitt is, haunting coffee shops, Subways, or standing on street corners, waiting patiently to cross but appearing to have no destination in mind.

It happens that I’m in the middle of Paper Lion, for which Plimpton spent training camp with the Detroit Lions as their “last-string quarterback,” and which is great so far. Earlier this week, I was reading it in a coffee shop and, looking up, noticed that the George Plimpton of bums was sitting twenty or so feet away. Perhaps because of the coincidence, I was attuned to all the other ones–even if they were only coincidental within the framework of my life and experience–that popped up as I continued reading.

Plimpton spoke at length to defensive back Dick LeBeau of the Detroit Lions, now retired and a defensive coordinator for . . . the Pittsburgh Steelers. The year that Plimpton went to training camp with the Lions, their other great defensive back, Alex Karras, was suspended for the season (for gambling). Although Plimpton only spoke to him later on, Karras looms as a kind of shadow over the book, with then-current players recalling anecdotes about Karras’s meal-time theatricality, his exaggerated responses to practical jokes, and his ballerina-like agility on the field.

Reading about Karras’s theatrical abilities and hammish tendencies was a bit weird because Karras would go on to have something of an acting career, probably more of one than Plimpton had. Most notable in Karras’s resume, of course, is the TV series Webster, where Karras played former football great George Papadopolis (whose name is weirdly similar to that of a former Greek dictator), who’s stuck raising Webster, a minuscule, insufferably cute black orphan played by Emmanuel Lewis.

Rather than distracting me from Plimpton’s day-by-day account of football camp with the Lions, all this extra-textual stuff has made the reading really fun and a lot weirder than Plimpton probably intended the book when he wrote it forty or so years ago.

(Post-script: I might be wrong about Webster being Karras’s most notable role: I just learned he also had a small role in Porky’s. Let’s call that a toss-up.)

So I had a very Valentine day by going to see Music and Lyrics, a story of love between an insecure writer and a has been musician. While the movie was your typical chick flix, there was a bit of a “that sounds familiar” vibe from grad school. Recently, we read a Francine Prose book Blue Angel for one of my classes. Well, Sophia Fisher (Drew Barrymore’s character) had a past affair with her writing teacher who then wrote a book about her seducing him and destroying his career. He then went on to win the National Book Award. Very familiar.