What The Internet Did To Garfield

Garfield is a newspaper comic strip starring the iconic orange cat of the same name, as well as his owner, John Arbuckle. Sullen and lovable, Garfield is based on the childhood memories of its creator, Jim Davis, and the 40 years since we first met this lasagna. Loving Rascal Garfield has become a global phenomenon with estimated annual merchandise sales. I've been covering fandoms for a while and

what

I enjoy about doing this is how when you look at a fandom long enough you start to get this very distorted. however a very honest reflection of its source material the heart of these simpsons sonic's descent the magnitude of undertale but then there's

garfield

believe me when I say

what

garfield

has become on the

internet

is the strangest fandom I've ever encountered and I'm not even talking about Garfield porn here, although yes, there is that too and yes, I had to upload my Google Analytics to find them.

No, I'm talking about much stranger things that, if you didn't know, let me give you. a little teaser or forward slash the alzheimer's group is a subreddit of 50,000 people who repost the same garfield comic over and over again each member playing roles this is the first time they've seen it relax jon is an eight animated series chapters in which a morbidly depressed john arbuckle is dragged into a terrifying alternate reality while being subsumed by a demonic garfield sorry jon actually jesus no we're not ready for sorry john but maybe in an hour and maybe they'll have You've noticed the running time of this video and are wondering how it is possible that I spend so much time on an idea that the subtle lowering of my father's eyebrows as I explained it communicated to me that it was something he considered a profound waste. of time oh god i was meant to make a video about berserk this year but i just got lost lost in garfield god i hope it's worth it but the answer is that i have researched garfield deeply and i have seen horrible, scary and beautiful things including which is to me, and I mean it, here is the greatest piece of fan art ever created and I would like to show you all of it, so join me on this long strange journey as we take our first step and ask a question about how.

Are we coming here from a cartoon cat who likes lasagna or, to put it another way, what is Garfield? So I want to be honest that, unlike the other fandoms I've covered for this channel, I've never liked Garfield that much. That doesn't mean I don't like Garfield, it's just that no, no, no, I'm not doing this. I don't need to humiliate myself to entertain you. That's not to say I don't like Garfield, I just never liked him much when I was a kid and that hadn't happened. It didn't change until this video, so my first call was to look for articles about Garfield's appeal, but what I found was the complete opposite, multiple headlines and videos about how Garfield is no fun and was never even meant to be like Jim. .

Davis is a marketing guy first and the comic was only intended as a vessel to sell merchandise and after reading a lot of Garfield and believe me, I read a lot of Garfield, I actually disagree, I think this is a pretty cynical mischaracterization. by Jim Davis and Can. It goes back to a single quote he gave 40 years ago and it doesn't really reflect the guy I've seen and read a lot of interviews with, who is the kind of guy who still talks about wanting to make the whole world laugh with a single Just kidding, but If I'm right about this, why do so many people find Garfield unfunny, and if that's the case, how has he survived for 40 years?

I'm about to be very generous with my interpretation of Garfield, but I think it's important to do so. That's because we need to understand the appeal here, and while I'm not going to defend Garfield's comedy, as we'll see later, I do find point one zero four percent of the Garfield comics funny. However, I think it's worth looking into the reasons for Garfield's humor. gets such a polarizing reaction from people jim davis's previous comic before garfield was norma the nat which ended in 1975 then spent three years doing nothing right before starting garfield in 1978 and to give that date some context that is not this decade or the previous one before that or the one before that or the one before that or the one before that but the one before that, except for the old media gods like Mickey Mouse and Peanut Garfield, has existed for longer than virtually any relevant character in pop culture today and you can just imagine this lazy, rude anti-authority cat being a little more outrageous in the late '70s than he is today in the same way that The Simpsons and Sonic the Hedgehog are.

They would have seemed wild and countercultural in their time before it slowly became commonplace, that's exactly what happened with Garfield, we're just not old enough to remember it and Jim Davis has even talked about this in interviews who said that I don't think Garfield's appeal is his humor, I think he is Garfield and what I mean by this is that we all want to be Garfield, please don't click on the video, I promise I have something to do here: think about everything you consider imperfect about yourself, physical, mental, emotional, any perceived flaws that make you feel ashamed, now imagine an alternative version of yourself where those flaws still existed but you simply accepted them you are in perfect harmony with who and what you are and that's it and well, that's Garfield, Garfield is lazy, he's gluttonous, he's selfish and people constantly make fun of him for being fat, but he doesn't care.

He's perfectly happy with who and what he is and any of his perceived flaws are other people's problems, not his, and those are some seriously aspirational confidence levels, but the real genius of the character is that he also has all these little traits that allow us see ourselves in him, Garfield hates Mondays, he likes coffee, he loves lasagna, he doesn't like spiders, he loves to sleep and he resents authority. These are all very general, but what that means is that no matter who you are, there's probably something in Garfield that you'll be able to do. relate and that relationship combined with his more aspirational quality creates this cocktail of a simple but tremendously attractive character and I think it is the strength of that attractiveness that allowed Garfield to survive for 40 years and I just want to point out here that as messy as the things are going to get this video, there is a lot of really interesting and wholesome garfield fan art from people who just seriously enjoy the garfield comic and his world, one of the most notable is the fan comic john, which tells the story of an older john arbuckle who rediscovers his love for art and cartoons and is just this super cute and endearing version of these characters, now you don't have to spend so much time searching for garfield fan art on the

internet

before things start to get weird like garfemon, a blog where an intrepid garfield artist has been redrawing the entirety of Pokémon as Garfield and I don't know how many there are because my browser crashes before I get to generation 1.

But what I think is really interesting about Garfieln is which shows how iconic and malleable the meaning of Garfield's visual design is. Garfield's visual design is recognizable enough to transform into basically anything and still read like Garfield. This will become horribly relevant later, but it doesn't just apply to Garfield's character design, but also to the comic itself. The Garfield comic was a large part of his spread designed to be as simple, timeless and consumable as possible, each one is completely self-contained and rarely, if ever, touches on current events and from even the early days of the Internet and social media, people have been taking these comics and changing them into something that is possible because of how simple they are. a formula they work with each comic following the same three panel structure the first panel sets the setting it's morning and john and garfield have just woken up the second panel is the setting garfield is in an unusually good mood and the third panel the punchline garfield is in a good mood because he drinks too much coffee, with the exception of the longer Sunday comics, that's how Garfield works and, like the character himself, simplicity was essential in allowing the widest possible audience to understand and enjoy Garfield, but it's also that simplicity that made the comic so endlessly memorable, it's surprisingly easy to make your own Garfield comic by stitching together different set-ups and punchline panels and you can even try this yourself with the random Garfield comic generators and it is that malleability that has led to the scores. of popular online trends, like replacing the last panel of a Garfield comic with an image of Garfield smoking a pipe, and an unusual number of these still work, but my personal favorite is the same, except the final panel now shows Garfield Garfield being thrown from a window.

Over time people also got a lot weirder than that, for example the silent movie Garfield Garfield with an extra Garfish Garfield beat panel with pixel art from that really bad Garfield game that was never released outside of Japan, Garfield , but the drawing becomes lazier. Garfield multiple choice except all 1978 comics are color averaged in real life garfield uncomfortably close garfield garfield evolves into noise two garfields polarized garfield you get the idea so garfield is this attractive iconic character communicated through this simple but medium infinitely consumable and recreable and I think this works far from helping us understand the existence of something like or eliminate the Alzheimer's cluster well, there is something undeniably cruel about this subreddit.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't think there wasn't something interesting and even a little poetic here about the idea. that someone's final link to their own reality is something as simple but recognizable as a Garfield comic strip and the tragedy of when even that too begins to fade; However, this still doesn't get us any closer to understanding why Garfield on the Internet is so you. I know, and I think a really easy answer here is that it's absurd to make such depraved art out of something so simple and everyday, but as you'll be able to see from the remaining running time of this video, I don't agree, I think I really There is something darker. and a stranger at play here and I'm not even talking about Garfield's very occasional official descent into something stranger.

I'm talking about a darkness that lies at the heart of every Garfield comic strip and to begin to unravel what that is, I want to talk about January 28, 2008 when 27 very strange Garfield-themed videos appeared simultaneously on a TV channel. previously unknown youtube. The amazing thing about the lasagna cat now is how strangely it was ahead of his time. It was 2008 and the term meme was still around. years away from becoming something people would actually say and yes lasagna cat made memes of Garfield comics but then they became memes of themselves before you finished watching the video and what I mean by that is that each el gato lasagna video is divided into three sections.

The first is a live-action recreation of a Garfield comic, the second is the actual comic that the first section was based on, and the third, and much stranger, would take the footage from section one and change it so that became this parody music video. game references 2008 internet humor lasagna took the Garfield comics and contorted them into all sorts of strange things, but tantalizingly underneath the sheer madness of it all was what seemed like a very subtle disdain for Garfield, there was something a little grotesque and strange in these shrunken ones. actors with their droopy suits and human hands, each sketch ends with the same canned monotone laughter that almost highlights the mundanity of these jokes garfield this is a diagram of the food chain you are here and that is a mouse down there any questions where is the pizza but the The strangest part was how each video ended with a strange tribute to Jim Davis.

This is one of the first really unusual things I noticed about the Garfield fandom. He has this kind of feverish obsession with Garfield creator Jim Davis, and I say unusual because in every other fandom. I've covered, I don't know if I remember a single instance where the creator of those properties appeared in fanworks, but Garfield is different time and time again, Davis kept materializing in fanworks, often in very strange ways and, To the best of my knowledge, lasagnaca knowledge was the first instance where this happened, so why? Well, if that was a question you asked in 2008, you'd be waiting a long time for an answer after the initial cat lasagna loading day, the channel would go silent.

The days would turn into weeks. Weeks. would turn into months and months would turn into years and without a single update lasagna cat began to fade into the darkness of the internet, so it came as a shock when nine years later a new video appeared on the lasagna cat channel ending withthe phone sex text. survey from February 9, 2017. This was the beginning of a strange rabbit hole of videos that led, two weeks later, to a strangely high-production trailer that said that if you called a toll-free number and left your name and the number of couples sex that you would have. had a Garfield web series coming back two weeks later and boom just like they had nine years ago. 11 new videos were uploaded simultaneously to lasagna cat and, although they were similar in format to the old videos, the first of the new ones were also very different.

The video begins as any typical lasagna cow would do, parodying an old comic where Garfield steals Jon's pipe, but what awaits us at the end of the video is not a repeat of the footage from section 1 that we are used to, but rather a man. Claiming that this simple Garfield comic transformed his entire existence while obsessively analyzing every little part of the comic in excruciating detail. His examination gradually expands into the immortal nature of mimetic art and culture and its ability to transcend humanity and even the laws of space and time and this goes on for an entire hour and it might just be the best video on the internet and in some ways this was just the beginning, while the original ending of the video sketches had that charm. amateur with a green screen feels that what awaited us in the third act of these videos were now surprisingly high-production short films that transformed simple Garfield comics into these elaborate surreal stories, jokes about Odie getting a bag stuck in his head transformed into these strange tales of the bag-headed od became a fashion icon before taking his own life and being condemned by garfield to a hell full of demonic chimeras by john arbuckle.

The jokes where Jon uses the wrong shampoo would now morph into well, this is what they would become and I don't want to describe this, those simple Garfield jokes were now being twisted to the strangest of extremes, contrasting the questionable mundanity of the original. with this wild madness and even more pronounced this time was that subtle malice towards Garfield. Each video still ends in those strange jim davis tributes but it is only in the final video uploaded to the channel that lasagna cat would reveal what it really was and that video was called sex survey results.

The sex survey results begin with john arbuckle entering his living room and sitting down to read the newspaper but he hears a knock on his door and who is there, to which he responds by revealing a strange white mannequin, the mannequin gives his name and number of sexual partners. Hi, my name is Garrett Smith and I haven't had exactly any sexual partners before the scene. Freeze frames and pull back to reveal a nearly identical scene and we start again, but now with Garfield instead of John, the same events unfold only with a new piece of audio detailing another person's name and number of partners. sex and we go through the cycle again, but now with Odie and then back to John again and then again and again and again and again and again and this goes on for almost five hours, all of which I have seen, most of it. which I did live on the broadcast, watching the sex survey results in their entirety is an exhausting exercise. mind-numbing repetition, but I think there is something important about that experience: you are listening to all these different recordings of people communicating what for many is quite sensitive information and it is strange and even a little uncomfortable, but soon you just go away. numb after an hour it stops feeling weird and after hours it stops feeling like anything because anything repeated enough times loses all meaning, not unlike a comic strip that runs day after day after day after day for 40 years and it is at that moment when that feeling is the strongest and you are completely numb to whatever is happening, that lasagna cat hits you with what has to be one of the most infamous and shocking images that is allowed to exist in YouTube at this point the scene has gone down. night the mannequins have begun to take strange and grotesque shapes and john opens the door for the last time only to find john arbuckle two arbuckle zero and immediately this second john is about 30 years old this new older john arbuckle now wandering the streets alone scared and Confused, he finds the dried shell of a cat which teleports him to a huge ravine where he encounters a strange naked shaman who attacks him before teleporting behind him and whispering silent words in his ear before Jon collapses into a pile of worms and land. roars and we film a girl screaming in a public school bathroom, we are given close-ups of her giving birth to a dead child and she steps back and looks down in horror before saying something in Polish, she leaves and we have one.

She takes the boy's end, but now there is a red-haired cat perched next to her. We cut, the cat is gone, and the baby opens his eyes before the screen fills with a block of bright orange. Well, that was a nightmare, but I actually think that lasagna cat. He has something really interesting to say, but to get there we're going to have to do a little legwork. Earlier in this video we asked what Garfield is, but now I would like to ask what Garfield is, considering I had little history with Garfield, I knew that. To answer this, I would need to immerse myself in it to understand the comic on an intimate level, which is why I committed to reading 400 Garfield comics, but I don't just want to study them, so I not only read Garfield, I collected data on Garfield and wrote them down. every observation I had in a large Google spreadsheet and through this I established that Garfield is made up of approximately 11 different types of jokes, such as humor derived from the fact that Garfield is lazy, gluttonous, absurd humor, relatable humor, others humors that were recurring jokes too sporadic for their own category, but mainly jokes about garfield doing things a cat would do in jest being a cat or jokes about garfield doing things a cat wouldn't do in jest being a cat, these are my Least Favorite Types of Garfield's Joke I measured for a variety of other variables, such as the number of fourth wall breaks, which was four, or the instances in which Garfield became suicidal, which was two, or how many times the comic made me laugh, which was precisely once and this was after many.

After many hours of collecting data from Garfield, I sought to answer a single question that would surely help me understand Garfield and, by extension, Lasagna Cat, what was the most common type of joke in Garfield and when I tabulated the results, what I saw it shook me. What was he looking at? But this couldn't be possible and I became concerned that the 400 comics I had pulled were a combination of all the comics on the Random Garfield Twitter account, which algorithmically pulls three random Garfield comics every day, as well as this video of YouTube ranking Garfield's top 100. comics maybe this video was a mistake, its author's prejudices contaminated my study, so I proceeded to read 200 more Garfield comics chosen completely at random from the Garfield web archive.

I counted the numbers again and this time it wasn't impossible, the results were even more pronounced if it were. Unconsciously selecting Garfield comics to affirm my own biases. I couldn't allow this, so I committed to reading a full year of Garfield each month and was selected in three- and four-year intervals throughout Garfield's four decades, bringing my total number of Red Garfield comics to 956. but then an idea occurred to me: what if I committed to reading every Garfield comic in existence? Then my data would be completely complete and indisputable. That's when I ran into a problem when I looked up the estimated total number of Garfield comics that exist, that number. it was 14,000, but how was it possible that many this video was already taking too long and at this point I had already spent several days reading Garfield comics and yet somehow I had only consumed 6.8 of all the Garfields, not the last time this video?

The very concept of Garfield began to seem gigantic and impossible, totally beyond the reach of my feeble mortal conscience. I decided that reading 14,000 Garfield comics wasn't a realistic goal. I know some of you will consider this a failure. I'm sorry. I read a sample. sizes and found that my current output of Garfield comics will leave me with a margin of error of around 1.5 percent and this is considered widely acceptable. I sigh and move on. I count the final numbers and rank each variety of Garfield joke from 11 to 1. The results scare me. Now I'm going to share this specific breakdown with you because I need you to see what I see before I get started.

I want you to ask yourself a question: what do you think is the most common type of joke in Garfield and I want? You should hold on to that assumption. As we move down the list at number 11, we get jokes centering on Irma, the owner of the local cafe, and how bad she is at running her business. These jokes account for only .42 of Garfield, just above that at number 10 with 0.5 percent being jokes about Garfield's girlfriend Arlene, at number nine, one percent was humor derived from how much Garfield hates to Nermal, at number eight, 2.3 percent is comedy conveying Garfield's hatred of spiders, at number seven, and 4.5 percent was relatable humor.

This was the first big To my surprise, I had assumed that a cat whose entire brand was based on a simple relatable quote would have more relatable humor in the comic of him. I was wrong and it wouldn't be the last time that number six, at 4.7 percent, derived a Garfield fantasy. Odie's abuse at number five at 13.7 percent was slightly surreal and absurd humor at number four at 16.8 percent are jokes based on Garfield being lazy or gluttonous and again, for reasons Obvious, I was surprised to not see this higher up on the list at number three with a 17.4.

The percentage is another, these are the type of jokes I don't like and number two with 18.8 is a mysterious category that I will reveal much later in the video for dramatic effects. Now, before I reveal number one, I want to stop and ask you again what do you think is the most common type of joke in Garfield in number one? And by far the biggest surprise on the list was a category I never would have guessed existed called John is Pathetic. John Arbuckle is 30 years old and lives alone. He has no real friends outside of his dog and his cat and he is constantly alone and these are all things that comedian Garfield enjoys ridiculing a typical John.

It's a lame joke that works like this. John says that he will no longer call women on dates and that he is going to wait. for them to approach him, we see him waiting, and then we see him waiting for what appears to be several months later. Jokes like this are very common not only in how women find John actively repulsive but in how he is pathetic and should be ridiculed and you can see this in how the comic portrays his intelligence, his hobbies, his fashion sense and even his physical strength and inadequacy in anything that could be considered remotely masculine in almost 1000 comics.

I didn't measure cases in which John showed admirable qualities, while Garfield is something to aspire to Jon is something to laugh at even when Jon found a girlfriend in Liz 28 years into Garfield's career and only after fans told him. they beg jim davis to put an end to john's loneliness, they still treat him as a pathetic character and i think there's something a little sad about that, a person whose only purpose is to be ridiculed and be trapped in that existence for 40 years and where This gets even sadder is when you start considering the comic from John's perspective in that same range of comics.

I measured 156 instances of John. show some sort of negative emotion or mental anguish anger depression lethargy, but if you're a casual reader of the comics, you may never feel that way, since every time Jon starts to sink into despair, Garfield is there to give a clever punchline and dissipate tension. but this is where we begin to delve into the very strange nature of reality and garfield sees as an audience, as readers of this comic, we can experience garfield's thoughts through the visual device of thought bubbles, but critically, this is not Jon's case in all cases. The Garfield comic I read did not record a single instance of Jon reacting directly to Garfield's thoughts in a way that couldn't be explained if he intuited Garfield's body language and expression, and that information is critical because it means the reality we are experiencing. and the one that john is experiencing are completely different and this brings us to the question of what it is really like to be john arbuckle on february 13, 2008 a comic by a garfield fan was uploaded to tumblr and it looked like a normal garfield comic but with one critical difference the first panel showed John sitting alone with the dialogue.

I've doneThings in my life that I regret. The second panel shows nothing but Jon's unbroken, remorseful silence. The final panel of the comic isn't marked by anything, just a slight change in John's expression. as if his regrets were washing over him, what this was was just a normal Garfield strip with one key difference: Garfield had been eliminated and because of the very specific way John and Garfield communicate, the comic still works, but while that before Garfield's punchlines could distract us from Jon's misery. That is no longer the case and this was the beginning of the strange and morbid Garfield minus Garfield webcomic that allows us to experience Jon's true and crushing reality and some of these comics are truly disturbing.

There is one in particular that is either very hopeful or very devastating. depending on your perspective, where John says we can't do anything about the past but we can do something about the future before he just disappears. Garfield minus Garfield wasn't the first case of people removing Garfield from the comic for this kind of effect, but it was what popularized the idea online that there may be something very wrong with John Arbuckle and eventually other works. of fans began to explore this in a similar way. Realistic Garfield, for example, conveyed similar themes by simply replacing Garfield with a realistic cat who couldn't speak.

Fan comics like Arbuckle, while animations like Meet Canyons Lasagna further brought up the idea of ​​Jon's fractured reality, depicting Jon as a terrifying, delusional lunatic who holds his terrified victims captive and forces them to play the part. of Garfield and Odie while warping back and forth. between the john arbuckle we know from the comics and something much darker, the reason all of these pieces are important is that they show not only that there is something a little wrong with john arbuckle but also that that is something that even in the early garfield days people in the online fandom took notice, but where things get even stranger is when we look at this through the lens of what john arbuckle was originally meant to be.

Remember earlier when I said that Norma Nat ended in 1975, Jim Davis then spent three years doing nothing and Garfield started in 1978, well that was a lie but I put it this way because for decades that's what people thought was true , listen to any interview where Jim Davis talks about Garfield's origins and he'll tell the same anecdote about Norm Nat failing because bugs aren't compelling characters and how that realization led him to look at Dog-centric comics like Peanut and Marmidou and telling himself what if he could create a similar character but for people who like cats and thus Garfield was born, except this version of events also ignores the existence of Heathcliff, another sullen, round, orange cat who It predates Garfield by about five years and this is not relevant at all, but I think it's funny, however, this story is a lie or at least not the whole truth because you see, in the period between 1975 and 1978 there was a third comic that was only discovered in 2019 by the intrepid historian's reviews of Garfield Clinton and this comic was simply titled John.

There are two very strange things about Jon the First: how much he looks like Garfield. Everything from jokes to entire designs are repeated in both series, the only difference being the main character. Here's John Davis He's talked a lot about how John Arbuckle is an analogue for him They both grew up on a farm They both live in Muncie Indiana And they're both cartoonists In fact, Davis originally wanted to use the character of John as a way to express his frustration with the comics industry, if you look at where Davis was in his life when he started writing this character, Trucks John started just two weeks after the failure of More Nut and you can feel that frustration in these early comics in one case, Jon. even turning to the camera and saying that he thinks the content of this comic will get him in trouble with parent groups and while Garfield still appeared a lot, there were strips where he simply didn't appear at all with scenarios more focused on observational humor derived from one man's perspective, but it wasn't long before he was broke when that began to change with jokes increasingly focusing on Garfield and not Jon. john's final strip was published on august 8, 1977, the strip returned a week later, but now.

It's called Garfield and within a year Garfield would be distributed nationally becoming the newest version of the comic we are all now familiar with. The second thing I find so strange about Jon is that while Jim Davis is often happy to laugh at Norm's failure, he almost never talks about John and when he does he only talks about it in the vaguest terms as if it were a idea in his sketchbook rather than an actual published comic and I can't help but wonder if there's something to say. that if the idea of ​​a comic that was to be its own perspective, its own coming to life was a failure surpassed by a fictional character that created even stranger as garfield continued, the similarities between jim davis and john arbuckle began to disappear John's work as a cartoonist practically disappears as he becomes the pathetic shell of a man we now know, and I'm not saying here that I think Jim Davis has some deep-seated trauma that manifests itself in his daily comic.

I don't really think so, but I think this perspective adds a lot to this strange meta-narrative of a man overcome by his own creation who abandons the character he once embodied and that character is now trapped in a life of existential suffering and here's the question if I was the only one. person who saw this then there wouldn't be a story here, but no, let's go back to those last five minutes of lasagna cat cat ended two years before john's discovery, but still what john adds to lasagna cat is kind of creepy as in that final scene when that second john ages, he begins to bear a striking resemblance to jim davis, the person we now know john was originally supposed to be this strange new combination of jim davis and john arbuckle lost and clinging to the shell of a cat that he should have let go a long time ago before coming face to face with a version of garfield who has become independent of him and is now strange and terrifying before davis crumbles to the ground survived by what he created which is immediately followed because of the bath scene and the interesting thing here is that if we translate the girl's monologue from Polish she says: this child is not mine this child is from darkness I have given birth to the curse of humanity my soul will be swallowed, vomited and swallowed again forever bad joke but no one laughs my blood will still be death is not the end I'm in hell this is hell and although I can't show it on the screen in that final shot the baby is shown with a shirt blue identical to John Arbuckles For works of art like this, I think there are a lot of different interpretations you can make, but for me personally, when the lasagna cat is taken in its entirety, it becomes this strange statement about what happens when the Things you create become more powerful than you, like Garfield. he has become this semi-immortal entity that has evolved beyond john arbuckle and jim davis and i mean, this literally garfield isn't even created just by jim davis anymore.

He has a whole team of people working under him who have become so adept at creating his work. It's now indistinguishable from his own, and Davis has even talked about selecting a replacement so Garfield can carry on long after he's gone, but here's the thing: It's not just Jim Davis' reality that Garfield has had this strange effect, it's also It's ours, which may sound strange, I mean. How relevant could Garfield really be in the modern era? Well, if I asked you which Superman, Goku, and Garfield character is the most syndicated, which one would you choose, and if you chose any answer other than Garfield, well, that was a strange choice given the topic of this video, but yes, it's Garfield. after several decades in thousands of newspapers around the world.

Garfield has an audience estimated in the hundreds of millions. The New York Times had to change the way its best-seller list was categorized after seven of its ten spots were taken. by garfield and today its merchandising sales are estimated between 800 million and one billion dollars and that's a lot to sell in 40 years oh, wait, wait, that's every year, that's every year in products, it gives to Garfield every conceivable shape you can imagine, for example. Garfield soap Garfield air fresheners Garfield cushions Garfield teapots a poster with Garfield as a ninja Garfield headphone holder Garfield thermostat Garfield commemorative coin Garfield digital alarm Garfield key hanger Garfield piggy bank Garfield walkman Garfield globe Garfield skates garfield ice garfield boxing gloves how to insult your friends garfield book garfield web browser ride in the amusement park garfield personal massager garfield a mug of garfield another mug of garfield a mug of garfield much sillier a mug of garfield that is even dumber than the first dumb garfield mug existential garfield another existential garfield a little too many irish stereotype garfield garfield vest sick garfield garfield gun satan garfield slime kid garfield garfield illegal garfield another garfield mug i don't know what this is garfield table another table more garfield garfield prison tray garfield sex too big garfield nightmare garfield this horrible sheet the deeply damned garfield eats what is this? why this Garfield puzzle that for some reason I can't put my finger on makes me afraid of God.

In the mid-80s, a small French coastal town began to suffer an unusual phenomenon when plastic Garfield phones began to appear on the coast, no one knew about it. where they were coming from or why this was happening, but it continued for three decades, a mystery that was only solved in 2019 when the mysterious phones were traced to a lost shipping container. We've so saturated this planet with Garfield merchandise that even Earth itself has begun to reject it, but if that's the case, why don't we take a closer look at Garfield? Why don't we see it everywhere every day? and the answer is because they don't want us to.

In the early 1980s, a production accident caused a Garfield plush toy with suction cups on its hands and feet. Paws Inc, Garfield's holding company, did not expect what was a failed product to sell well, so it was a shock when the toy became so popular that it sparked a wave of car thefts where radios and wallets were left behind and only the stuffed animals were stolen, sales rose to a staggering $50 million, and what did Jim Davis and Paws Inc do? ? We pulled every stuffed animal off the shelves for five years, we didn't want Garfield to be a fad, we wanted to quietly inject him into every part of our daily lives where he could hide in plain sight quietly growing into one of the most dominant fictional characters. of the planet and this is what they achieved in what I am about to do. to tell you it's not a joke this is not a space jam 2 esk hijinx all of this happened in the course of making this video an experience that i call the garfield phenomenon started in a small way at first i was watching a tv show and oh hey there was garfield i was looking at instagram and uh my friends were posting about garfield and oh a text i guess chris pratt is playing garfield in the new garfield movie that's a weird moment wait why toby fox is talking about garfield and sexy gothic garfield? started trending on Twitter and I started to feel a little uncomfortable, so maybe I'll try to relax and watch some gaming news and oh hey, I guess Garfield is the new character in that hit Nickelodeon fighting game, isn't it? as great as it had been. watching re-zero which I didn't like very much and someone told me that Garfield appears in the second season which simply can't be true and what a friend sent me a photo of a mural in an old house and there was Garfield looking at it Me He looked with what I can only describe as a kind of omniscient contempt.

Now I was doing my best not to think about Garfield and I agreed to watch the first episode of the new Dexter series with my partner and wow yeah, I can only imagine. Brian wants to call him Garfield, I mean, what did he say? Everywhere I looked I saw Garfield, but why was this happening now? Well, that answer would come to me and it did in the form of a phone call. Hello hello. Son, oh, hello mom, how are you doing, John? I know you're working on your Garfield video right now, so guess what I found, the picture of you with your Garfield, oh lady, I don't think that was me, it never really was. that in garfield so earlier in this video when i said i never liked garfield, that was true.

I don't remember this. I don't remember having this hugeGarfield doll, but that's me and that's my mom and this happened. I don't remember and that's when it started to click that when you look for Garfield you start to find him everywhere, even in the past, this is the Garfield phenomenon, Garfield is around us and always has been, but we never realized count, but my eyes are open and now so are yours if an alien race were digging up a ruined earth they would think we worshiped garfield and they would be right these are the three keys to unlocking what garfield has become on the internet: a strip comic of a newspaper designed to be as simple and consumable as possible, but because of this it becomes unintentionally malleable and recreable by spreading online editions, one of which unknowingly touches on a strange meta-narrative of a man being surpassed by his own creation , that creation eventually becomes an entity unto itself, one that has remained outside of man's perception for 40 years and will remain there for an infinitely more transcendental humanity.

This is Garfield's strange modern reality and now that we understand it we can enter the world of Sorry John October 22, 2013. A comic was uploaded to the Internet showing John Arbuckle waking up late one night, but something is wrong wrong, something is very wrong, your room is bathed in an eerie orange glow, a strange material that covers your walls, your furniture and your entire house, go downstairs to try and discover the source of this problem and upon entering the kitchen sees Garfield, his cat's strange swollen head strangely embedded in the wall, his fur extending outwards covering every surface of his house.

He was so hungry that John notices with horror his entire house with him inside it. have been ingested by garfield sorry john this was the beginning and in the following years, increasingly strange and terrifying depictions of garfield would begin to appear on the internet, comics that seemed normal at first only to take disturbing turns with garfield often . portrayed as something strange and unknowable, one of the most popular was 2017's Gramfell, a darkly humorous webcomic whose first pages focused on John's depression, which was met with a nihilistic and indifferent Gram Fall, but as the comic continued, Gramfeld began to reveal to Jon not only the inherent. not the unhappiness of life, but the futility of his existence as a character trapped in a webcomic that breaks John down to his core components and traps him in strange, surreal realities over and over again, at one point even transforming Gramfell's own webcomic. in a different series. called jan and graham in which jon lives the nice, peaceful life he always wanted before jon is torn from his peaceful slumber and on the final page he is forced to acknowledge that he is alone and that he will always be what i find so fascinating. about gram phil is that it's that same john and garfield dynamic taken to a cosmically nihilistic extreme, this was the central concept of what would inform everything that was to come, but in particular, granfeld never really felt scary or disturbing because to the simple pastel cuteness of his aesthetic and if garfield horror on the internet was going to really solidify he needed an aesthetic and the following year he would get one in 2018, an image would be uploaded to instagram by horror artist will burke depicting a horribly swollen garfield clutching a scared little john with the text john i need lasagna.

Something about this image resonated with people and it became wildly popular online becoming the first in a series of five illustrations, each depicting Garfield as a grotesque, bloated monstrosity, his form swimming among mounds of flesh and sharp-like appendages. The horror of seeing Garfield twisted into such nightmarish forms was a large part of the power of these images critically. They also captured the type of hopelessness of John Arbuckle's character, but channeled it into pure horror. An illustration showing Jon terrified and clutching a shotgun like a Garfield-like grotesque centipede emerges through the door behind him with text saying Bullets Don't Work Jon.

The final image of this series shows a gigantic Garfield now towering over a terrified and helpless Jon as he whispers that the world is going to end. The internet uproar was posted, reposted and upvoted tens of thousands of times and would become the blueprint for everything Garfield would become online as different artists began creating their own interpretations of Burke's work, like animator Lumpy Touch, who took Burke's illustrations and reimagined them. Through stunning and gruesome pixel art animations, they not only give these still images a gruesome new dimension through movements, but also recast them as a 2D survival horror video game with a gritty twist that carries this concept. even further later with a first-person exploration recreation of the original.

Sorry John Comic, in addition to creating a walkthrough for his own fake Garfield survival horror game in which the player is chased through one of 13 bloody fields, all based on the different signs of the zodiac and what I really love about this is that you can see. that type of existential horror introduced by graham phil, as well as the more grotesque body horror introduced by burke, is now merging with other horror media and genres and you could see this continuing to evolve in other illustrations such as those by artist omega black, who took Garfield's idea of ​​horror and introduced a cosmic supernatural feel like this image in which Garfield claims I don't need eyes anymore, Jon, which I'm pretty sure is a reference to the 1997 film Event Horizon, a sci-fi horror in which a group of astronauts board a lost starship that has returned from hell with the infamous line but where are we going we won't need eyes to tell the other illustrations by omega black only expand this lovecraftian style of garfield horror with a grotesque centipede as garfield which claims that heaven is a void of lies jon or jon held captive by hooded haters before an incredibly massive garfield with multiple arms explodes i am eternal jon every new piece of garfield fan art added to this idea of ​​garfield as a cosmic being horrible which is sometimes referred to as creepy garfield or gorfield and this is what led to october 8, 2018 and the creation of the subreddit or slash.

Sorry John, there's almost a cult feel to Sorry John, the title plate says that Garfield has abandoned his limited form and is beautiful, give it up. Surrender to him and be saved. This is a community of nearly 800,000 people dedicated to bringing to life this new version of Garfield that the Internet has created, as well as his infinite torment of John Arbuckle. Maybe, like I did, you're thinking that no, it's not Garfield. evil, he's not trying to hurt jon, it's not like that mystery garfield joke category number two is in fact humor based on garfield's tormenting of jon, but that's right at 18.8 percent almost one of every five garfield jokes focus on garfield causing mental anguish to jon and it's not just that another variable i measured was the number of times garfield showed empathy towards jon or attempted to comfort his suffering in some way and in almost 1000 comics that number was zero , in the same way, Garfield minus Garfield reveals something real, if unintentional, about Garfield, the same thing happens in Sorry, John Garfield has always been about a person trapped with a cold nihilistic self that torments him and has been that way for 40 years and all that or I'm sorry, what John does is bring that concept.

To a horrible extent, this is why I think so many pieces of I'm Sorry John have this strange kind of power, their horror is rooted in being trapped with something horrible and inescapable, but what's really fascinating about the My horror, I'm sorry, John, is how different artists have approached this idea in different ways. I like to categorize things, so I've identified what I think are three basic types of horror. I'm sorry, John. The first is Garfield's physical horror. These are pieces that transform Garfield. Strange and terrifying creatures sometimes in amalgams of disturbing body horror, but more often they bloat Garfield to nightmarish proportions that there is no chance of Jon ever defeating, escaping, or even surviving these grotesque beasts that Garfield has become. and what's interesting here is how many of these pieces evoke or even directly reference the dark soft souls and bloodborne games, which create much of their horror and excitement by forcing you to fight these massive, hideous creatures that feel impossible to overcome. ;

It's that kind of physical hopelessness that these pieces create, and like Those Games, the most extreme examples of this kind of Garfield horror, they have an almost Lovecraftian cosmic feel to them, as Garfield is now so big, so impossible, that He begins to feel like some kind of terrible deity, a being of such immense power and scale that it throws him into chaos. our own sense of humanity's place in the universe, whether we truly are the dominant species we have always assumed or simply dust behind something much greater. I just read that line and I can't believe we're talking about Garfield the Second.

Garfield's brand of horror is more intimate and psychological here, it's less about Garfield being a physical threat and more about the subtle, insidious damage he's doing to John's mental state, sometimes in the form of a hideous creature and malicious woman who constantly follows Jon and encourages him to drive. it makes him do terrible things, but sometimes as a delusional presence in John's own mind, a manifestation of his internal struggles, whether depression, addiction or worse, in a way that feels similar to your shinings, your silent hills. or reading your own comments section, these pieces are much rarer.

But what I think is amazing about them is how they take that desolation that has always been a part of Jon's character and express it through Garfield. There is a third type of Garfield horror and these are my favorite posts that focus on a more existential form of Horror, the simplest examples of this are pieces that trap Jon in these impossible, infinite liminal spaces where there is no escape and Garfield will always haunt him, but other scenarios are more elaborate, like when not even death itself can free Jon from Garfield's clutches. showing Garfield as this immortal, endless being who will always return to Plague John or even the opposite, like in this comic where Jon takes his own life to escape Garfield only to be brought back to life by him so that his suffering can be continue.

Other pieces are stranger. and even more abstract, like showing garfield as these grotesque physical parasites that have attached themselves to jon and feed on him while he's trapped in these strange, endless dream worlds and i think where this particular kind of horror becomes really powerful is when combined with the more psychological type of Garfield horror that we just talked about, like lumpy touches, it relaxes John, which we mentioned earlier, and what I think is cool about this animation is that it shows John coming home one night in his most shattered moment, his life now destroyed after having lost his job liz and even odie and it is at this point when he is at his lowest point when he is most vulnerable to a being like garfield who offers john an escape from his miserable existence in the form of consolation but actually drags him into a terrifying nightmare and I love this because it's a fantastic example of what Garfield has become on the Internet.

Garfield is despair. It is the part of John that makes him feel weak and insignificant, that brings him down and traps him in dark and terrifying realities. central garfield horror and sorry john, it's interesting to note that this concept has only continued to evolve online in sub-communities like, you're welcome, john, which is a healthier, if still very disturbing, relationship between jon and a nightmarish garfield cosmic. just like or slash, I'm so sorry John, which I can't even talk about if this video has any hope of staying monetized. Hey, by the way, this video will almost certainly be demonetized, which is why I have a patreon, there is a level. a dollar, so yeah, but look in any direction, I appreciate you looking at me, you can even see this very definite brand of Garfield horror transplanted to other fictional series, sorry, John's occasional weekends that aren't from Garfield and although I really love these pieces, Ernie, how?

Do I look with your iceberg with your eyes? God, that's so good. I think it's interesting how, at least for me, they never have the same level of impact or meaning as those based on Garfield, not least because of how deeply ingrained the horror of i is. Sorry, John is at the very core of Garfield, but also how, when combined with everything else we've talked about today, these pieces begin to transform who these characters are and, in particular, John Arbuckle, when I started this video, all John was was this idiot. friend, but over time that beganTo change, I saw him go from being a character with a very defined purpose and reason for existing to someone who loses that purpose and becomes a pathetic joke for the world around him and it is as if that experience caused this deep emptiness.

A desperation arises within them that makes life seem pointless and impossible in a way that the Garfield comic can barely contain until one day that desperation begins to manifest as Garfield, an entity that traps Jon in this deep and horrible illusion. that warps every part of your reality. This entity with each passing day becomes stronger and more terrifying as Jon falls deeper into despair and when I think about this last stage of John's existence, there is one artist in particular that comes to mind. Part of what makes Rajom's work so powerful and terrifying is how intimately they seem to understand Garfield's particular brand of horror.

Some pieces show Garfield as these enormous monstrous beasts whose reflected existence conveys this horrible physical uselessness. Others show Garfield as this gigantic, grotesque parasite like this insidious force that has been with John since the moment he was born. and for years he has manipulated and twisted every part of his life, exhausting john until finally garfield has become so powerful that he is now more of a god than anything else, so infinite, cosmic and terrifying that he has become all of reality. of john and john is now just a hopeless speck of dust. and terrified of this thing that he created until the end of time and I think there is something really powerful in these images.

The beautiful thing about horror is that it allows us to externalize the things that torment us and when I look at Omega's work. black touch or lumpy or rajam what I see is a person fighting against someone whose existence stopped making sense a long time ago and who is trapped in this horrible distortion of what their life should be and I think there is something very human in that when I think in retrospect. In the worst periods of my life, what I get is this feeling of being trapped in my own mind, that there is something in me that is distorting how I see the world and the people around me and everything, and it's horrible, it's a nightmare.

And I think the hardest part is the feeling that it will never end, that what you feel in those moments is how you will feel for the rest of your life and if you have ever struggled mentally or emotionally, you know that fear. and it is that fear that I have never seen better visualized than in Garfield fan art we all want to be Garfield but we are all John Arbuckle and the thing is that those bad times never last, they do end and I think that is why this final piece is so hopeful that It's done in the traditional Rajam pendent style, but with a subtlety that makes it feel almost carved in stone, and shows a demonic Garfield lying defeated and broken, with one foot immobilized in a sandal that belongs to an angelic.

John Arbuckle tears rolling down his face, his wings raised on this glorious ark and it's like after everything we've seen John go through, after all the loneliness, the depression, the complete loss of his identity that leads to the dissolution of its reality in this abject infinity. nightmare after all he has somehow reached this moment he has taken back his life from what torments him and it is beautiful and maybe this won't last maybe there are still darker times ahead but it doesn't matter because right now he is fine John is fine and look, I understand. I get that having this strong, emotional reaction to what is undoubtedly a shitty Garfield post is ridiculous, but damn, that's what I'm doing here.

I'm hoping I can get it. The title of this piece is John's Forgiveness oh um I put the costume back on because I was worried this part might be too heavy without it and I also paid a lot of money for it which makes John's Forgiveness so powerful for me it's that in isolation it's an incredible work of art and a real technical achievement, but when taken together with everything else we've talked about in this video, it becomes the final chapter of a gigantic metanarrative that is formed around john arbuckle and again if i was the only person who saw there wouldn't be a story here sorry john being the third most popular post in our sorry john bar of all time likeas well as gracing its cover and i think It's amazing that the individual works of so many people come together to make such an incredible story out of something as simple as a daily comic strip about a cat who likes lasagna.

This is what I love about fandoms when you watch them long enough, beautiful and strange stories start to emerge that are twisted and honest and surprising, and whatever else you want to say about today's internet and social media nightmare. day, I'm glad those stories have a place to exist, I think it's great friends, thanks for joining me today and I really hope you enjoyed this video. I want to give a huge thank you to the artist lumpy touch who made the amazing thumbnail for this video. lumpy dutch has so many amazing things i made. I can't even touch this video, so be sure to check out his YouTube channel and follow them at lumpytouch on Twitter.

I also want to thank Quentin and Izzy's reviews for laying the groundwork for this video and giving me some fantastic leads, so thank you all, if you want to help me make more videos like this head over to patreon.com slash super ipatchwolf , where for just a dollar you can help me do more, whatever it may be, thank you. you also did a dao this week and i just want to immediately apologize for my pronunciation of that name chelsea cyanide house augusta wickman bubbly girl emmanuel walls and fang slime find me as always hosting the let's Fight a boss video game podcast on twitter at eyepatchwolf or on twitch .tv forward slash super eye patch wolf friends take good care of yourselves and see you next time