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Five Jim Davis’s — creator of that unfunny cartoon cat, where 20% of the jokes are about how Monday sucks and the rest are about how much the cat likes lasagna (and those are the punchlines!) … five Jim Davis’s could spend the rest of their lives writing comedy and never, ever produce the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld.

So said Joel Spolsky in 2005. Bill Waterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, pegged Garfield “consistent”, after reaching for nicer words, before calling Jim Davis’s other strip, US Acres, “an abomination”. And this certainly seems to be the prevailing conventional wisdom, placing Garfield as some sort of Pauly Shore of comics.

Yet I’ve always liked Garfield. It’s never been the pinnacle of human capacity for humor, but it has been just that — consistent. It joined Snoopy^WPeanuts in being the short-form comic strips I grew up with. They both established a sense of “daily routine”, and went on to instill the idea of humor in the banal and everyday things and occurrences that were droll to any five-year old. (This might explain why I mostly shun the US notion of a comic being the DC/Marvel crap.) Peanuts was about as much same-old, same-old as was Garfield, but Garfield was more livid. Snoopy always acted out in thought balloons, unless he ran into the legendary neighbor’s cat, of course.

It’s easy to put down Jim Davis for “over-commercializing” his comic — and of course, there’s a lot of evidence in the tons of Garfield merchandise produced and sold under the “Paws” brand. The father of Snoopy, Charles M. Schultz, has avoided this and employs somewhat of a Frank Sinatra position in the mindset of comic readers — awed, rightfully, for long, dutiful and excellent service. But I’m willing to bet you that there’s more Snoopy merchandise sold.

One thing has for the last several years reclaimed Jim Davis in the broader mind, and that’s the single week of Halloween comics from 1989, which leaves readers and Garfield himself totally lost in a dark house, everyone else gone. This is a radical departure from the strip’s usual ho-hum Odie-trashing ways (and indeed the “ugly monster” approach to Halloween that Jim Davis is no stranger to) and proves that Jim Davis is capable of slightly deeper work than the strip proper.

A few months ago, Garfield Minus Garfield appeared, an adaptation in which Garfield is completely removed from the picture — literally. Many instances of this filter turns the strip into severely disturbing imagery, and some just recreate a different variant of the haw-haw comedy that’s been Garfield’s trademark for decades. But some actually completely reframe the comic, reinforcing the description “Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.”

I’ve known tremendously little about Jim Davis as a person, and it stands as a testament to him that he saw Garfield Minus Garfield and went “Huh.” A piece in the New York Times on the adaptation sources Jim extensively, and he acknowledges that it’s made him think differently about what makes up the comic.

“If Jon is happy, my strips don’t work,” he said. “There’s something about that chemistry between Jon and Garfield that makes it work absolutely perfect,” he said, because those conversations are “all in Jon’s imagination anyway, which is pretty weird and creepy.”

Update: Dan Walsh, the creator of Garfield Minus Garfield, adds in his comment that the above part is to be attributed to him, not Jim Davis.

[..]
Mr. Davis, who has been drawing Garfield for 30 years, said that “Garfield Minus Garfield” has actually prompted him to take a different look at his own work. He compared Mr. Walsh’s efforts to the cerebral approach of Pogo, the comic strip by Walt Kelly.

“I think it’s the body of work that makes me laugh — the more you read of these strips, the funnier it gets,” Mr. Davis said. As for Garfield himself, “this makes a compelling argument that maybe he doesn’t need to be there. Less is more.”

In alternate settings where another comic and main character had been singled out instead, I propose that the initial DMCA takedown notice would have been framed and on the wall by this time in many outcomes. (Garfield Minus Garfield is a parody and protected under fair use, but sullen egos and trigger-happy “Intellectual Property” lawyers have been known not to care about such ridiculous propositions as facts and laws.) Jim Davis was sufficiently intrigued that along with the 30th anniversary edition book later this year, a book “inspired by” Garfield Minus Garfield will be issued.

Jim Davis may very well never be able to produce another (or the) Soup Nazi episode. Garfield may be droll or repetitive and completely void of “unsafe” topics. Nevertheless, I have a whole new respect for him and for the comic. Just like Charlie Brown, with his continuous and crushing relationship with the world, was the actual focus of the Peanuts strip, I think maybe Jon Arbuckle might be an adult counterpart, when read using the correct filter. And I especially hope that Jim Davis will be viewed in a new light by the establishment that’s been heckling him and his comic for ages.