Sunday, July 16, 2006

Little Boy Blue and the Cat in the Moon


Title panel: A Honeymooners title sequence parody? The most timely Sunday title panel satire in Garfield history!

Hi Jon, what are you doing? Oh, sitting at the table sideways, eyes glazed, breathing shallow, mind lost in the cosmos. That's a fine way to spend a Sunday. What's Garfield doing? This week is a cornucopia of Garfield transgressions left to the imagination. The last panel at least lets us know Garfield was either setting something on fire, or screwing around with poison gas. The frame-left off panel area frame=left of the Table is usually indicated as the kitchen, so it's probably just a grease fire. These clues lead to a bigger mystery:

Was Garfield cooking for himself?!

The final panel's second-biggest mystery:
When a cat SHOUTS in green letters inside his brain, does it make any difference to his owner? Or is this just a satire of the terror alert levels? Jim Davis equates them with a panicked lout who's caused his own fire, utterly failing to communicate the situation with those who need to be alerted, and creating only alarm among a nation of Jon Arbuckles.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And here I was, thinking that Garfield was too high-brow for Mallard Fillmore-esque political humor.
Oh, well. I suppose I can forgive it this once.

Anonymous said...

Oh god damn you, Stangl, you've got me doing it now! My own fragment of unhealthily detailed Garfield analysis, which struck me reading this strip...how awesome is the dark shadow of the smoke cloud on Jon's face as he looks up? It perfectly conveys the deeply ominous implications of the cloud and Jon's own terror, raising the even from "comedy smoke cloud" to "dark cloud of existential fear and doom"...

p.s. awesome awesome blog mate