HE SURE IS FAT

Over at the Prophet my love-hate relationship with Slate has been leaning a lot more toward hate in the last week, but I do love Chris Suellentrop's take on the Garfield enterprise:

The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," [creator Jim] Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

Is he ever. Like Suellentrop, I must admire Davis' cunning business instinct:

What's kept Garfield in business for so long is Davis' canny understanding of how much is too much. ... Garfield was veering into the realm of faddishness. In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. "We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. "We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years."

And I'm all for capitalism. Given the approach taken by Davis vs. that of Bill Watterson, whose Calvin and Hobbes was an infinitely better comic strip, I'd lean toward Davis'. Garfield may be soulless, but Watterson's unfortunate refusal to license his characcters gave rise those awful Calvin-pissing car window stickers.

This does not mean I read Garfield, ever. Nor do I read comic strips at all anymore. (Name a strip going today that can rub shoulders with The Far Side, and maybe I would.) I read Garfield as a kid. A lot. I remember borrowing my grandparents' books of Garfield comics and laughing (okay, chuckling) at Garfield's hatred for Mondays, love of lasagna and, of course, rotundity. But it's been the same thing every day for decades, and I've had better things to do for almost a decade now. That unobjectionable blandness may keep it in business, but it's a very large part of why I haven't read the comics page in years.

Despite the vocal presence of Bill Murray, and in part due to Roger Ebert's endorsement (Phooeyhoo is right), I have no plans to see the movie version. But good for Jim Davis, I guess.

P.S. Speaking of that J.D. Salinger wannabe who used to draw a great cartoon strip with characters named after an uptight Protestant theorist and a hard-nosed philosopher, this investigative attempt at a profile of Bill Watterson from last year is very interesting.

P.P.S. And while I'm busy linking to Wikipedia entries, it's telling that the article on Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes is longer than the entries on John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes combined.

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posted by WWB at 5:35 AM |