My personal history with Jim Davis's Garfield is long, starts out passionate, and ends apathetic. Five years older than me (and turning 30 this very day), it's the first comic strip I can remember from my childhood. The actual date of the strip eludes me, but what sticks in my mind is one Sunday strip about a grotesquely fat woman at a laundromat being obnoxious, and a weekday about Garfield terrorizing a grotesquely fat kid. As I grew older, I became rather obsessed with Garfield's routine antics, devising a way to purchase all of the collection books (in black and white, thank you very much), and honing my ability to replicate Davis's trademark bug eyes in the Garfield fanart that adorned the margins of my math homework. I even found Garfield and Friends one of the highlights of my weekend and celebrated its decidedly lesser new theme song introduced in the Fall of 1994. Seriously, the thing's pretty much unwatchable.

So I became disenchanted with Garfield. The strips themselves seemed to flatten out and get lazier, too, as the years wore on and I stopped paying much attention to the funny pages. Nearly the entire supporting cast was dropped, and the only narrative arcs were those weeks where Garfield would watch TV all week.

But a few years ago, something magical happened. Garfield, more oversaturated than overweight, reached a critical mass of bitterness and disappointment as a bunch of twenty-something hipsters like myself found that what we once enjoyed just wasn't so much. Were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons and their ilk still as readily available as they were after school in the nineties, there'd be a lot less nostalgia and the cultural tee-shirt landscape would look a lot different than it does. So the tide of opinion on the Internet turned against America's first fat cat. And the Garfcore movement was born.

As far as I know, it started with the Garfield Randomizer, which assembled panels from Garfield comics in a--you guessed it!--random order, creating an offbeat juxtaposition of Garfield's formulaic cadences that the Internet reacted to with much rejoicing and refreshing. I could quote half the Internet at the time as saying "It makes Garfield funny!" And thus was born a new art form: making Garfield funnier.

A bunch of websites cropped up that did this, but a forum topic at Truth and Beauty Bombs seemed to really set off the trend of removing Garfield's thought bubbles, leaving us with only the now borderline schizoid ramblings of Jon Arbuckle. They were funny. Some of the best recontextualized the jokes, while others saved bad, tired puns and redundant dialogue-based jokes from themselves in digging up the decent underlying sight gag. The Comic Strip Doctor and Eric at Websnark wrote some good articles about this in 2006. Recently, Jon's been rendered completely schizoid and almost inhumanly pathetic by Garfield Minus Garfield.

But what really sold me on Garfield-as-art-project was Chris Stangl's marvelous analytical work at Garfield: Permanent Monday, which launched with the brilliant tagline, "A Week of Garfield. Every Week. Until We Die." Taking a cue from the magnificent Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke and the inimitable Josh Fruhlinger's The Comics Curmudgeon, Stangl embarked on a noble quest to get to the heart of Garfield's themes of quotidian rigor and emotional barriers, illuminated not just by his description of the text but by his observation of Garfield's economy of line and its limited visual motifs. While largely tongue-in-cheek, Stangl never reduced his work to snark and actually presented a frequently compelling argument. Though the author disappeared in October of 2006, only to reappear in January of 2008 with three commentaries, his reading of the strip has influenced the way I read it. With those tools and that palette to draw from, I've actually found myself enjoying Garfield again in recent years.

And then there's Fatal Farm, who brought us the inspired Lasagna Cat: Tributes to Jim Davis. Sitcom-style reenactments of various choice strips, followed by excellently-produced music videos. Thus far, this is the pinnacle of Garfcore. Witness my favorite installment in the series, a strip from April 20th, 2007.



We've entered a strange new world in our pop culture, and Garfcore is a shining example of the strange dialogue we're having with it.