Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.
And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like.
Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers.
I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip.
Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here?
To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising.
It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.
I always kind of thought that the "it was meant to be marketable, not funny" thing was a cope, in the same way that Tommy Wiseau says that The Room was always meant to be a comedy.
People would say that the cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagna isn't very funny, so he responds with "uhh, it wasn't ever meant to be that funny anyway!!!".
Regardless, I do really respect how cool he's been with stuff like Garfield Minus Garfield.
> That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield
If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...
> Zalgo Garfield
Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.
Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner.
So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all
It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).
Available for borrowing at https://archive.org/details/garfieldhis9live00davi
7th life is dark. 5th life is a close second.
Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books.
And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield
Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!
My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since.
Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money.
Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.
Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once.
But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas.
I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters.
Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.)
I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.
I hardly ever watch those anime which go on forever like Bleach.
When I go out as
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116484198935085911
I find 20% or so people in the general population in my town recognize who I am right away because they watched either Naruto or Demon Slayer and those are both in my queue so I can understand better what they know about me.
... but it is hard because there is Slayers and Futari Wa Precure and many many anime that have a few 12 epsiode seasons in my queue. And a lot of that is in the "so bad it's good category". One of my guilty pleasures is
https://w1.backstabbedinabackwaterdungeon.xyz/chapters/1/
which gets really good over time because the crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match and I never would have discovered the light novel and manga if I hadn't been willing to watch a truly atrocious J.C. Staff anime. Only in Japan can some ordinary person write a web novel, get a contract for a light novel, get a manga made, then get an anime, video games, etc. The "media mix" strategy lets their industry market test content with low risk and the anime doesn't even have to be profitable on its own if it convinces 10,000 or so obsessive fans to shell out $150 to buy all the books of the light novel and another $150 to buy the books of the manga.
The cost structure of the US media industry is a lot worse and divides between super-expensive prestige content and a tier of slop. It's all a gatekeeping-industrial complex and no wonder people are pissed about DEI, "woke" and all that because it's a zero sum game. The industry would love to get another J. K. Rowlings and we've probably had 10 of them who never got greenlit because of low risk tolerance.
> crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match
Is this the origin of that trope? I've seen a couple of anime/manga that use the same story as a jump off point. Character that doesn't know their own strength kicked out of the party for being "weak" only for us to later find out they are one of the strongest/most powerful individuals in the world.
Nah, that one is too new. Turns out this guy's power is only useful at the very bottom of the most dangerous dungeon which has dense enough mana that he can summon people and items stronger than the surface world. It's marketed as a crazy revenge fantasy and it is that, but it would be unfair it to compare it to the really mean-spirited revenge stories that come out of Korean and China.
[dead]
Hilariously, Dragonball is a rehashing of a far older folktale.
The very beginning was. Most japanese comics are designed to be serialized for a long time, and are built to change direction if needed: Getting serialized is difficult, and low enough reader scores get you kicked out of the magazines, so it's common for a story to be built to swerve. Early Dragon Ball is a light thing like Dr Slump but a little more some fighting, but anything related to the old folk tale was dead and gone by, say, the second time there's a martial arts tournament. Most of what most people think about regarding dragon ball is past the moment where we randomly learn, through the power of retconning, that our main character was an alien all along, and people of his race are invading earth. Not quite the kind of thing from Journey to the West
Some viewers will remember growing up with the TV series Monkey, whose bizarre images and stories of Pigsy and the titular flying Monkey I shall never forget.
Monkey Magic theme song anyone? https://youtu.be/wddJnq-D3XM?si=J2xAgXoygreTD73w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(TV_series)
Rehashing and inspired by are different things.
There are certain elements of Journey to the West found in DB but not even Goku is similar to Wukong. Yes, monkey-like features, extending stick, perhaps a couple of early characters but everything else is not even close. So I don't think it's fair to say that is a rehash.
Judging from the initial portion of the anime Dragonball pivoted gradually from a loose adaptation of Journey to the West (with Goku as the protagonist among funny versions of traditional characters) to a more original and specific setting and plot (with Goku as the most important of many Saiyan and martial artists).
Which one?
‘journey to the west’ [https://collider.com/dragon-ball-journey-to-the-west/], about 400 years old.
Another Chinese classic is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I think that might be one of the oldest character-rich media franchises of all times. Drawings of Cao Cao and other characters have been identifiable for hundreds of years. They are still making video games (Dynasty Warriors) and TV shows based on it.
I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).
I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.
Heh I never expect to see Demon Girl Next Door in public let alone in HN of all places. Seems like I'll have to see that backstabbed whatever too eventhough I never touched any work of that genre.
It’s healthy in that there is a lot of interesting stuff constantly going on, but the actual work conditions are incredibly unhealthy for a lot of those creators.
> I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
Only men?
> He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.