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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Circa 1989, around the time my female contemporaries were fantasizing about John Stamos, I had a brief fondness for Garfield, the comic. While I don't regret it - after all, it's precocious to have the humor of a middle-aged housewife before entering your second decade of life - I long ago closed that chapter in the book of Morland. Of course only the vaguest familiarity with the comic is necessary to appreciate the genius of Lasagna Cat, so that embarrassing childhood background I shared was just for pity.

Posted by morland @ 06:39 PM

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I made several trips to midwestern cities as a child in my father's 1973 Dodge Imperial. It's a large car, and makes you feel large when sitting in it, even if you're only ten, which I was. On those trips my father invariably took me to bookstores, and the only books -- the only ones -- I ever got him to buy were of the Garfield series. I can recall when Jim Davis sort of fattened Garfield out, made him literally rounder and more expressive of emotions that weren't rooted in laziness and sarcasm. It was around the time he got rid of Jim's "roommate" and got rid of Nermal the cuter, younger cat -- a name I almost gave to a stray we adopted -- and focused on Garfield being cute. Garfield stayed cute, and his books tried to present a new, semi-clever title that varied the concept of Garfield Sits Around The House or Garfield Wakes Up, etc., and I don't remember how I ever got out of the Garfield fix. I think I even bought the coffee-table book "Garfield's Nine Lives" which imaged nine ways that Garfield could have been imagined by artists other than Jim Davis. I remember everything about that book. I remember it better than the Dodge Imperial, which is where I made out with Kathleen Hartman in 9th grade. The car's gone, the stack of books are gone. I think I owned thirty-seven by the time I moved onto things like ... oh, Bloom County.

Posted by: Paul Winner on March 12, 2008 08:40 AM

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