Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
Garfield, the lasagna-loving comic strip cat who hates Mondays, has remained curiously relevant in the age of the internet. Credit the existential despair of offshoot Garfield Without Garfield, or perhaps the strange deluge of earnest inquiries into the intricacies of Garfield’s very existence. But Garfield hasn’t…
Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s Jim Davis’ warm, rounded illustrations. Or, hey, maybe it’s our mutual love of lasagna. But Garfield the cat has not only come to stand at the intersection of a fertile litter of online debate, but he’s also ensured that these inquiries, no matter how crude, are explored with a wealth…
There are a few precepts that are accepted as read within the Garfield universe: Garfield hates Mondays. Garfield loves lasagna. Neither Odie nor Nermal actually exist, but are rather psychic manifestations of Garfield’s subconscious fears of abandonment. And of course, in one classic strip, Garfield’s owner Jon chugs…
If you were to look at Garfield’s Wikipedia page—which, why would you not, Garfield is hilarious and fun—you would notice that next to his gender is not one but four separate annotations.
Garfield has been around since the dawn of time, drolly reflecting on Mondays, lasagna, the meaninglessness of existence, and how pleasant it is to be asleep. Jim Davis’ decision to turn his creation into every possible form of merchandise over the course of decades has resulted in more shitty Garfield products than…
Out of the cottage industry of internet humor mocking Jim Davis’ Garfield, few entries are as ambitious or as surreal as Fatal Farm’s Lasagna Cat. Beginning with a live-action recreation of some random Garfield strip—featuring actors performing in terrifying Jon, Odie, and Garfield costumes and delivering the lamest…
Nearly four decades ago, Jim Davis set the template for the internet phenomenon known as Grumpy Cat: Take a distinctive looking house cat, fill its head with sarcastic grousing suitable for hanging in the workplace, and watch the merchandising money pile up. The mixed-breed meme also known as Tardar Sauce brought…
Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Tuesday, November 1. All times are Eastern.
Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, is unlikely to shed his image as a sexless, socially inept nerd any time soon. But consider the facts of the case. He’s been an essential player in a successful multimedia franchise for nearly 40 years, meaning that he’s recognized all over the world. Besides being a musician and…
In an effort to both serve our readers and help support The A.V. Club, we are going to post daily links to deals and interesting items that we find over on Amazon. If you use these links to click through and buy something—not just the thing you clicked—on Amazon, we will see a portion of that income. You don’t have to…
Some may consider Garfield, a staple of the funny pages since 1978, to be a relic from an earlier, much lamer era of comedy. To modern-day cynics weaned on Adult Swim and YouTube, the long-running comic strip is merely a tame, tired throwback to those pre-internet days when people were genuinely amused by a fat,…
You know what they say: “If at first you make a movie and no one likes it, and then you make another movie and it becomes a pop-culture punch line, then try, try again.” That’s the apparent Hollywood folk wisdom behind a recent article in Variety detailing Alcon Entertainment’s attempts to get a new series of…
This whole writing thing seems to have worked out pretty well for Stephen King, all things considered. Largely through novels and short stories, but also occasional screenplays and teleplays, King has become one of the most successful and well-known writers in modern history over the last four decades or so. But…
So much depends upon an overweight, orange tabby, devouring lasagna atop a kitchen counter. If a Gizmodo piece by Ashley Feinberg is to be believed, a private Facebook group devoted to Jim Davis’ long-running comic strip Garfield might just be the last refuge of sincerity and sweetness on the entire internet. For the…
A.V. To Z is an alphabetical survey of a specific realm in pop culture.
Garfield Minus Garfield’s existential angst and despair may have just been one-upped by a new parody cartoon: Hetfield The Cat. The creation of Chicago cartoonist/musician Jimmy Two Hands (who’s also responsible for Danziggy, a hybrid of Misfits lyrics and the loveable funny pages loser Ziggy), Hetfield The Cat grafts…
Poor Jon Arbuckle. Without Garfield, he’s nothing but a sad and lonely man. The website Garfield Minus Garfield has made a point to remove panels of the cat from each cartoon strip, and reposts the results displaying Jon’s horrific existential angst and depression. But YouTuber Jeff Stormer has taken the whole sad…
In a new interview with The New York Times about her novel The First Bad Man, Miranda July revealed that in the week of her life, Garfield is the Mondays. Asked about the worst book she’s ever read, July told the NYT that she is a lifelong Garfield hater who has despised the cartoon cat far longer than the poseurs who…
For the past three years, The A.V. Club has devoted the month of December to reflecting on our favorite holiday entertainments, and this year is no different. It’s a feature so nice, it’s never had the same name twice, and this year it’s the 12 Days Of Non-Denominational Winter Holidays. Today: the 1987 animated…
