You may have noticed that “The Garfield Movie” was the No. 1 movie in America last week, earning $14 million and taking over the top spot from the infinitely more hyped “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” It has grossed $55 million in North America and $156 million globally in two weeks.
After more than 45 years of daily strips (that still get made every day), three feature films, 76 books, three animated series, dozens of video games and a literal boatload of merchandise, we may ask, how did we get here?
In an attempt to answer that question, we took a trip down the Garfield rabbit hole.
So Much Merchandise
The first thing you come across is the merchandise. There are T-shirts, phones, watches, furniture, clocks, slippers, tents, wallets, trading cards, eye shadow and roller skates with Garfield’s leering image.
There was even a Garfield toilet seat cover. “It turned out to be a great product. It was real colorful,” Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, told The New York Times in 2019. (There are, in fact, numerous Garfield toilet seat covers.)
This is no accident. Davis released the three-panel newspaper comic strip in 1978 with an eye toward selling his creation.
“I’d like to say it was some sort of a divine inspiration that created the strip,” Davis told The Washington Post in 1982. “In fact, it wasn’t so much that as a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character.”
First came the books. Davis grouped the strips into collections and they were a hit. In November 1982, The New York Times Trade Paperback Best Sellers list featured seven Garfield books among its top 15 titles.
Davis’s creation was so inescapable that for 30 years a beach in western France reported that pieces of Garfield phones were mysteriously washing up on shore. In 2019, The New York Times reported on the phenomenon, which turned out to be caused by “a long-lost shipping container, nestled in a rocky sea cave.”
Cohen vs. Coen
From there you get to the cartoons and movies. The animated “Garfield and Friends” ran for seven seasons from 1988 to 1994. There was “Garfield: The Movie” in 2004, of which A.O. Scott wrote in The Times, “you are likely to leave this one feeling as grouchy and put-upon as the title character.” Audiences didn’t seem to mind. The film grossed $203 million globally.
The biggest surprise of “Garfield: The Movie” was Bill Murray agreeing to voice Garfield. According to Murray, however, it was a misunderstanding that led him to do the movie in the first place. In a 2010 interview with GQ, Murray joked about taking the role.
“I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I’d like to do that.”
It was Joel Cohen, whose credits include “Cheaper by the Dozen,” not Joel Coen, the Oscar winner, who was one of the script’s writers. Still, that didn’t stop Murray from returning for the sequel, “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.”
‘Garfield Minus Garfield’
In digging a little deeper, things begin to get weirder.
In 2008, Dan Walsh, a 33-year-old technology manager in Dublin, created “Garfield Minus Garfield,” where he erased Garfield and all the other characters from the strips, leaving only his owner, Jon Arbuckle.
That year, The Times reported on the phenomenon:
Mr. Walsh does nothing to the panels except strip away Garfield and other characters like Odie the dog and Nermal the kitten to create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle, the main human. Without the cutesy thought-bubbles of his lasagna-loving cat, Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.
Davis took the opportunity to license a “Garfield Minus Garfield” book.
That seemed to open the floodgates for Garfield content that embraced odd humor native to the internet. Other remixes followed. There was “Pipe Garfield,” where the last panel is replaced with a panel of Garfield smoking a pipe.
“Garfield Censored” is a strip that replaces one panel with one that reads: “The cartoonist has elected not to show this panel due to its graphic nature.”
Live Action Garfield
This is the point in your journey where you might come across something called “Lasagna Cat.”
Fatal Farm (the duo of Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max) are known for creating and directing surreal advertisements for Old Spice and Skittles and for their work on episodes of “I Think You Should Leave” and “Key and Peele.”
They also made “Lasagna Cat,” a web series with two seasons made nine years apart. In 2008 they released 27 short videos on YouTube that were live recreations of Garfield strips followed by a music video and often ending with photo of Davis.
Almost 10 years later, Fatal Farm released another 13 episodes, featuring longer videos with higher production values and even more bizarre content. For example, in “10/20/1984,” a live re-enactment of a strip is followed by a re-creation of the “Miami Vice” episode featuring the Phil Collins classic “In the Air Tonight.”
Or, there’s “07/27/1978,” where a live re-enactment of the strip featuring Garfield smoking a pipe is followed by an hourlong lecture, voiced by the actor John Blyth Barrymore, dissecting every aspect of the strip while talking about art, the cosmos and corruption in the tobacco industry. It has been viewed 3.9 million times on YouTube.
The final video in the 2017 season is almost five hours long and is titled “Sex Survey Results.” It is the only video without a date as a title and the only one that does not feature a re-creation of a strip. It is also one of the strangest videos on the internet. It almost defies description. Watch at your own risk.
‘I’m Sorry Jon’
Now the journey goes from strange to dark.
There is plenty of wholesome Garfield fan art out there (like Garfemon, which imagines Garfield as Pokemon), but there is also a very bizarre and very dark Garfield fan art subculture.
In 2013, the artists Sam and Toby Alden posted a web comic in which Jon Arbuckle awakes to find himself inside of Garfield, and Garfield tells him, “I’m Sorry Jon. I was so hungry.”
This was followed by Garfold, Gramfel and a series of Instagram posts by Catherine Burke, all of whom took the character of Garfield and turned him into a hideous monster terrifying his owner.
This genre of art became so popular that it spawned a section of Reddit known as r/imsorryjon, with over 800,000 users, that is dedicated to dark Garfield fan art. This phenomenon is also known as “Gorefield” or “Creepy Garfield” and it’s very, very weird.
‘Don’t Look in the Basement’
After taking a deep breath, we went back to Garfield strips (again, new ones appear every day) and books to see where this dark side of Garfield might be coming from.
If you look hard enough, there are glimpses of it in some original Garfield content. “Garfield: His Nine Lives” was a surprisingly unsettling 1984 book that features nine Garfield stories, most drawn by artists other than Davis. One of the stories ends with a primal version of Garfield attacking a grandmother.
In early Garfield comics, Jon had a roommate, Lyman, who suddenly stopped appearing in the strips. When asked where Lyman had gone, Davis jokingly wrote, “Don’t look in the basement.”
A 2002 online video game called Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt featured Lyman chained to the basement wall of a haunted house.
There was a series of Halloween strips in 1989 (known as “Garfield Alone”) that read like something out of “The Twilight Zone” and spawned strange theories that the entire strip has always taken place in Garfield’s imagination.
The panel ends with Garfield going through what seems like an existential crisis and beginning to question reality. After taking a deep (maybe too deep?) dive into Garfield lore and fandom, we know the feeling.
