Let's check in on the state of the funnies page, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer

My hometown is about an hour’s drive from Cleveland, close enough that the Cleveland Plain Dealer was delivered here, and growing up it was my favorite of the handful of newspapers available.

It had a much bigger and better comics page than that of my local hometown paper, it offered me one of my first windows into the bigger, more exciting world beyond the city limits in places with buildings higher than five stories and populations bigger than 30,000 or so. And, it was the Plain Dealer which gave me my very first professional writing opportunity—Seventeen-year-old Caleb got $20 for reviewing Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the PD teen-written special section back in 1999.

I hadn’t really perused a physical copy of the paper since moving down south to Columbus, Ohio just about a decade ago, and my only real experience with it was online (I’d often check the PD or other Ohio papers because Columbus’ daily, The Columbus Dispatch, is the worst paper in the world, and despite having office right across form the Ohio Statehouse, they rarely had state government coverage to equal that of the PD or the Akron Beacon-Journal.

Well on Friday I found a copy at my father’s house, and it was the first time I read the Plain Dealer since print media had started dying. It looks like they slimmed down their trim size like most newspapers, and adopted a general shorter-is-better philosophy. For example, in their weekend tabloid-format entertainment section pull-out, a column that used to be somewhere between 600-800 words now looked like it had shrunk to about 400 or 500 words, and the movie reviews all looked shorter (and a few were purchased from wire services).

The most striking change was in the comics section though.

Specifically, they don’t even have a comics section anymore, they have a “Diversions” section.

This is filled without about 30 comic strips, plus crossword puzzles, the jumble, a word find, Sudoku, Dear Abby and another advice column, TV listings, horoscopes, a bridge column, some game type of thing called “Public Squares” and an ad for a car dealership, right there on the section front (Ugh).

Actually, perhaps even more striking than the funnies being relegated to a miscellaneous section of the paper is the format of the four-page section. It’s 22 inches long, like the rest of the paper, but only nine-and-a-half inches across, about two inches shorter than the rest of the pages in the paper. Well, the front of the section is nine-and-a-half inches across; the back page of the section is even shorter, about eight-and-three-quarters-of-an-inch across.

They’re also all in color. On a Friday. Weird.

(Above: That's their funnies on the left, next to a regularly-sized newspaper page and my straight edge)

So, of those 30-ish strips, laid out pell-mell up and down the “Diversions” section, most of them are familiar to me as having been in the PD’s funnies since my childhood. There were half-a-dozen new ones that I don’t recall being there my whole life (The Pajama Diaries, Prickly City, Pearls Before Swine, Rhymes with Orange, Frazz and Free Range). That’s at least one-fifth of this comics page that’s changed in the past 25 years or so, and that’s pretty good for the comics pages in most big city dailies, I’d wager.

Well, let’s see if there’s anything to smile about in the Friday, March 19 Plain-Dealer Diversions section. (Hmm, can I still call these the funnies? Or are they now the diversionees…?)


Sally Forth

Sally’s boss (or co-worker? I haven’t read this strip in years) Ralph meets Sally’s younger, hotter sister, and can’t shut up about how bad he wants to fuck her. I think that’s what’s going on here.

This strip is hopefully a re-run from the ‘80s, because otherwise I can’t explain why Sally and her sister are dressed like that. Ralph actually calls attention to their clothes—“Look at your sister, Sal. Now this is how you should dress!”—so I assume here baggy turtleneck sweater with a giant, roll-down collar and huge hoop earrings are meant to be fashionable.

I do like the way this strip is drawn though.


Jump Start

I haven’t read this in so long that I don’t even know who the characters featured in this particular installment of the strip are.


Crankshaft
This is the first strip on the page that I don’t understand at all. It’s one of the installments of Crankshaft where I suspect that it isn’t really a sit-com strip about a cantankerous old bus driver and his family, but is a serious drama strip that is published in another country, perhaps Germany, that has been re-dialgoued for American audiences.

I can think of no other explanation for Pam’s facial expression in the second panel.

Nice cross-hatching, though!


Born Loser

The lead character’s boss is wearing what appears to be a black tuxedo—or at least a three-piece suit—and spats. In black and white, it just looks like a nice suit. In color though, the vest is canary yellow and the tie or ascot is purple, so he pretty much looks like he’s wearing one of The Penguin’s old suits.


Hagar

Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Oh man, the wait at the doctor’s office sure can be long! And that was so even back in Viking days!


Blondie

Dagwood and his young cloneling are sitting on the couch watching TV and the television set is one of those thin, flat screen jobbies. It…upsets me, for some reason. I don’t like seeing modern technology in Blondie, as it seems anachronistic and out-of-place. I always assumed the strip was still set in the mid-fifties.


Beetle Bailey
Actual combat appears to be occurring in this strip, for the first time in my lifetime. However, since the combat seems to involve two opposing armies of tanks, I assume it’s just some sort of war game.


Mary Worth

I only read Mary Worth on The Comics Curmudgeon, because I need someone to find something noteworthy about it and explain that thing to me.


Marmaduke

Holy shit you guys, I saw a preview of the live-action movie before Alice in Wonderland on Monday and it looks terrible. I mean, when I first heard that they were going to make a Marmaduke movie, I assumed it would be terrible, but that preview made it seem a few thousand times worse than I had imagined.


Speed Bump
My dad laughed out loud at this one, and pointed it out to me.


Free Range

Okay, here’s another one I just flat out don’t get:

I feel there’s a joke about the use of friend as a verb on Facebook and the word “kemo sabe” to be made, but I’m not sure if cartoonists Bill Whitehead made it here. I’m not even sure a joke was made at all.


The Pajama Diaries

No joke in this strip, it’s about cancer. I didn’t know other strips could do cancer. I thought Funky Winkerbean owned it the way Peanuts owned footballs-being-pulled-away-before-they-can-be-kicked gags.


Get Fuzzy

I hate the designs of all the characters in this strip, which often makes it hard for me to enjoy it, but the script isn’t so bad.


Wizard of Id

Hmm…this is even less funny than I remember it being, and I don’t remember it ever being funny…


Judge Parker

Hey, Mike Manley’s drawing now! I didn’t read this strip. I only read Judge Parker when there’s a drawing of a sexy lady in it. This one’s just two brown-haired guys in suits talking.


Peanuts

I think it’s high time to retire the strip. The PD is printing it at about half of the size as the other strips on the page anyway, as if they too know it’s time to get rid of it, and yet they can’t quite commit to going all the way with it.


Dilbert
I think this is the closest thing to a funny strip in today’s section.


Garfield

Scratch that. This is:
Are you talking about the dog’s bark, or are you talking about your own strip there, Garfield?


Zits

I like the lines in this strip a lot, but this particular installment simply has a single panel of Jeremy and his mother standing over a counter top in a white void, while Jeremy says something trite that sounds like something one might see on a t-shirt.


Doonsebury

Eh, ringtone humor.


Prickly City
This one’s new to me. A little black girl is talking to someone she identifies as “Secretary Napolitano,” who is only seen in one of the four panels, a long shot in which Napolitano is seen in silhouette. They are talking about Napolitano being bad at her job, and they are in a barren desert for some reason.

Perhaps if I read more strips I would understand the context of a little girl and the secretary of Homeland Security talking in the middle of a desert, and would thus be better able to appreciate what’s supposed to be going on here.


Pearls Before Swine

Sometimes I find this strip kinda funny. This installment didn’t do much for me though. Well, the last panel is kinda sorta clever. One character, picking a fight with another, says, “Care to step outside?” And the threatened one turns and says “Yes. Because I’m leaving.” That’s not bad, I guess.


Bizarro

This is a Mr. Potatohead joke in a one-panel gag cartoon.


Rhymes with Orange

I have nothing to say about this strip.


Non Sequitir

Or this one.


Family Circus

So the dad is standing there holding a newspaper, and the mom and dolly are standing there in identical dresses. The skirts are pink and red plaid, and fall all the way to their feet. The tops look like black tanktops over purple turtleneck sweaters. And Dolly says, “We got matching dresses… … ‘cept Mommy’s came with more curves and things.”

See, it’s funny because one of them is a grown woman who has experienced puberty, and the other is a little girl who hasn’t.

Well, it’s funny in theory.


The Amazing Spider-Man
This is part of a zany storyline in which Spider-Man, the superhero who became a do-gooder after learning that “with great power comes great responsibility,” has decided to flee New York City because super-criminal Sabretooth is there.

This strip is fantastic.

It opens with a completely gratuitous drawing of Mary Jane in a bikini, and the second panel, which seems like it should be occurring a second or so after the first, based on the dialogue, finds MJ now fully dressed and carrying a package under her arm.

Did they just stop their conversation so MJ could take off her swimsuit, get dressed, wait in line and then make her purchase, only to pick up where they left off…?

Comics are weird.

Review: Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna

I’ve been thinking a lot about Garfield lately, having just read Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna (Ballantine) and Garfield Minus Garfield (Ballantine again), and having wrote a review of the latter.

I don’t really like Garfield.

I don’t like the strips, I don’t like the cartoons*, I was very glad I didn’t have to see either of the live action films despite working as a film critic at the time (I remember my editor saying she couldn’t bring herself to make someone else go see them instead of her, as it would have been too cruel) and when I see a Garfield coffee mug or some other piece of merchandise with the character on it, I become filled with revulsion.

The thing is, I used to like Garfield. Growing up, I used to read it—and the rest of the funnies pages—every day, seven days a week. There was a time when it was one of my very favorite strips. I can remember being really excited about a Garfield Halloween special being on when I was a kid, trying to draw Garfield and Odie myself (they were hard; not Donald Duck hard, but hard) and I have a distinct memory of sitting in an armchair in the house I grew up in, playing with a little plastic Odie pencil-topper for hours one afternoon (I remember the chair was dark brown, and I was imagining Odie digging this elaborate, Dig Dug-like maze of tunnels underground).

So what happened?

“I grew up” seems like too easy, too pat an answer. Certainly my sense of humor and my tastes in general have gotten somewhat more sophisticated, but not by all that much. There are plenty of things I liked as a kid that I still like—Star Wars, G.I. Joe, “G1” Transformers, He-Man, superheroes, Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry’s art, The Chronicles of Narnia, Looney Tunes, Popeye, and on and on and on.

Is there something particular to Garfield that separates it from other things I liked as a little kid to the extent that not only do I not care for it at all anymore, but I don’t even feel any nostalgia for having once liked it, but only confusion and shame over my prior fondness?

Is it the character’s sarcasm and cynicism, which might seem sharp to a five- to ten-year-old who had yet to be introduced to other examples of sarcasm and cynicism with which to compare it? (Certainly Garfield seemed edgier than Family Circle, Hi and Lois and Marmaduke; Doonesbury and Bloom County often went unread, as I never got any of the jokes).

Or perhaps that the first ten-to-300 times you read a joke about how Mondays and spiders are awful, or that dogs are dumber than cats, or that teddy bears and lasagna are both pretty great, you find it amusing, even funny, but by the 301st time, the humor evaporates, and by the 650th time it’s lost any and all appeal?

I don’t know; I suspect both of those reasons may be factors, along with the fact that as my own personal horizons broadened as age and geography gave me access to more popular entertainment material, and that more and more great comics of all kinds have become available over the years, what bloom might have been on Garfield’s rose seemed to wilt all the faster.

So, with those 500 words about myself out of the way, I suppose it’s time to turn to the alleged subject of this post, Garfield: 30 Years of Laughs and Lasagna (Yes, I’m afraid this is going to be one of those over-long, unfocused reviews I sometimes tend towards).

First of all, I should say this is an extremely nice-looking book. Thomas Howard is credited with the design, and I say “Well done, Mr. Howard.”

It’s a rectangular hardcover, all in orange and black, save for the whites of Garfield’s eyes, the white lettering of the sub-title (“The life & times of a fat, furry legend!”… too bad I can never read the word “furry” and merely think of something covered in fur anymore, but instead of perverts in plush animal suits; damn you, Internet!) and the silver lettering of the title.

The image is an extreme close up of Garfield’s eyes and nose, caught in a smile, reducing Davis’ design to some essential shapes that seem to give it new life. Under the slipcover is more or less the same close-up of Garfield, only now the image is unencumbered by the title, and his face has drained of all enthusiasm, a thought cloud reading “Shut up and feed me” appearing.

Oh, Garfield, you glutton, you!

The rest of the book? Well, it’s not without value. Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about Garfield lately, and as easy as he is to hate—as awful as the strip may be—it is popular, and it’s worthwhile to consider why it’s so, what makes it so, whether it’s good for the comics page and other cartoonists, and how it got to the point it is now.

I can’t say I laughed at all during the reading of the book—in fact, some parts of it made me sad, and/or confused—but the specific format of this particular book at least offers an overview of sorts to the strip, its components and its evolution.

Dean Young, the cartoonist currently caretaking Blondie for his late father Chic Young, provides an introduction. Apparently, Young and Davis are good friends, and based solely on the introduction, neither of them seem at all funny. He shares two anecdotes about his best friend of 30 years to try and convey their zany relationship.

This one time, before a golf tournament, Davis’ glasses broke, but, get this, he had to wear them anyway! And this other time they were on a boat with the guy who does Mother Goose and Grimm, and one of them pretended to fall out of the boat, but he was just pretending!

Oh, my sides!

From there, the book is divided into three main sections, each focusing on a decade’s worth of strips (then followed by Davis’ selection of his personal favorite 30 strips). They’re broken up randomly by paragraphs of Davis musing about the nature of his work and humor in general, and profiles of various characters.

These are all less than insightful. For example, “Garfield can get away with such bad behavior because he’s a cat. If humans were to act this way, they would be despicable.”

Or “I’m glad people want to have Garfield on their coffee cups, T-shirts or on a poster…It’s flattering. Garfield’s success has opened up many doors for me, allowed me to live a comfortable life…”

The most interesting decades for me were the first and the last, because they’re the ones I was least familiar with (I was only one-year-old when the strip began, and obviously not reading newspapers yet; I quit reading it and an awful lot of the comics pages somewhere around high school).

Davis’ characters are so familiar-looking, with such a uniform appearance from artist to artist and occurrence to occurrence (that is, the Garfield on a desk calendar looks like the one on the coffee cup looks like the one on the greeting card looks like the one in the newspaper strip), that it was interesting to see how Jon and Garfield looked in their first appearance (It’s a bit of a revelation how much the designs have evolved, not entirely unlike how crazy Charlie Brown and Snoopy looked in the first years of Peanuts compared to their “final” forms that exist in the popular imagination).

In the very first strip, Jon introduces himself as a cartoonist, which honestly blew my mind. I had no idea what he did for a living, and am kinda glad to hear he’s a cartoonist; he’s home talking to his pets all day because he works from home, and not because of the debilitating mental illnesses Garfield Minus Garfield suggests he suffers from (and, as Dan Walsh of GMG points out, is also implied in Davis’ won strips since Garfield doesn’t really talk to Jon, but “thinks” at him; so whether Garfield is physically in the strips or not, Jon is still talking to himself all the time).

In that same strip, Garfield is gigantic. He looks more feline, and less round. His head isn’t quite spherical, but he’s all jowls beneath his ears. His shape is also less round, and more like a huge tiger-striped gumdrop. Oddly, Garfield grows smaller and smaller as time goes on, although he eats more and more.

Odie has also changed quite a bit, originally looking rather Snoopy-like from the neck up (albeit a lobotomized, bug-eyed Snoopy).

Throughout the strips in the first decade, 1978 to 1988, you can see Davis refining his characters, their eyes becoming bigger, their heads and bodies stabilizing into smaller, rounder, more expressive shapes. By the end of the decade, the characters have reached their final iterations, and the strip has settled down into its somewhat tiresome format, where Davis simply chooses one of the 12 different jokes from a Garfield joke bank to illustrate on a particular day.

The 1998 to 2008 strips were all new to me, as I rarely if ever read Garfield during that time. It was kind of strange to me to see the characters using computers and talking about email, as they seem to exist perpetually in the ‘80s for me, and it was nice to see Jon apparently having a relationship with the vet Liz.

It’s nice to see some evolution in the characters’ static lives, and it opened up the possibility for a different set of Jon jokes.

While I can’t really appreciate Davis’ sense of humor any more, and a lot of the drawings seem lazy and uninspired, the character design work that went into the original cast is pretty impressive. Say what you will about Garfield, but he’s a great character design. Davis also got an awful lot of emotion out of his characters; I’m particularly impressed with his ability at drawing characters’ eyes. Davis may not be much of a comedian, but he’s a hell of an actor when it comes to cartooning.

Finally, and somewhat disturbingly, Davis seems like a really, genuinely nice guy. A lot of what he says about his work seems obvious and less than incisive, but he clearly seems like a guy who likes his work, likes his life, and is good at it. All of which makes me feel a little bad about hating it.

Davis may not be a great cartoonist, but I suppose he’s great at doing Garfield, and if that’s what makes him happy (and makes him tons of money), then I suppose it doesn’t really matter how much I personally love or hate his work, now does it?



*Lorenzo Music’s voice work aside. That guy was great.