I'm honestly really confused. Like, every single strip I've seen is just so incredibly unfunny. But apparently it is or at least was incredibly popular?? How exactly did it become so popular? Are there actually people who are like "ah Garfield, I love Garfield so much, I can't wait for the next Garfield to drop" or was it like something people saw and shrugged and said "alright" and moved on?

I actually searched in Google to find people posting actually funny Garfield strips, and at least in most of the ones people were bringing up you could see where the joke was supposed to be, or there was an actual attempt at a joke. In most of them. When the "cream of the crop" only "mostly" passes as a joke then there's a problem.

Of all the "best" ones, there was a total of 4 which... Weren't funny exactly but at least they actually had a punchline that was kinda cute I guess. This was the best I managed to find: http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/1988/ga881207.gif

Yeah, that. That's the most amazing I could find. Both the movies were like 100 times better than anything in the strips, and that says a lot. I seriously can't understand it and because Garfield was never popular here, I don't personally know anyone who read that shit, and I can't help but feel like it's all a big joke or something lol

  • Dbumba [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Garfield was never funny. It was specifically made as a marketable vessel to be as generically appealing as possible for syndication, media rights, and merchandise.

    Kind of like that addage George Lucas is a toymaker first and a filmmaker second. Garfield just became recognizable because of a massive coordinated effort of the media marketing machine. Jim Davis created Garfield purely to mimic the syndication success of Peanuts, and Charles Schultz was the cartoonist who convinced Davis to draw Garfield to walk on two feet instead of four.

    Paws Inc, the parent company of the Garfield Enterprise, is worth around $800 million dollars today. Garfield was never funny.

        • Pezevenk [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Also:

          The movie won’t take the nation by storm—in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly—but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD and then be remembered only by the small sample of tots in the viewing audience who turn into ironic hipsters during their college years.

          This article predicted the future and me in particular.

        • Pezevenk [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Shouldn't making you laugh be kind of a selling point tho? That's what weirds me out, how this is so popular and not anything else.