It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and at least three Christmas-themed comics from that strip. Today's comic is Garfield.
Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries.
The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.
Day 10 is now opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...
WHAT IS GARFIELD?
A lot of the time, these descriptions are actually necessary, but that's really not the case for Garfield, which is literally in the Book of World Records as the most syndicated comic strip, well, EVER. So I assume that most everyone knows who Garfield is, but I guess I'll give a very quick refresher's course for those of you who still don't know.
Created by Jim Davis as part of his local comic strip, Jon, Garfield launched nationally in 1978 and very quickly became one of the most popular comic strips around. Davis specifically created Garfield to come up with a marketable character, but I don't think there's any way that he could have ever realized just HOW marketable Garfield would become. As I noted in the Bloom County spotlight, Garfield became such a licensing sensation that Berkeley Breathed introduced his own Bill the Cat character as a parody of the commercial nature of Garfield (of course, irony of ironies, Bill the Cat then became one of Breathed's most commercial characters). Garfield merchadise has been EVERYwhere for nearly 40 years now.
A while back, Jim Davis finally sold the rights to Garfield to Viacom, but he still continues to put out the strip, over 40 years after it debuted, and it remains very popular, with most people likely correctly arguing that the universal appeal of the strip is how much Davis avoids getting into anything beyond general gags. Garfield is a lazy fat cat who loves lasanga, and constantly argues with the upbeat pet dog that his owner, Jon Arbuckle, also owns. And...that's pretty much the strip. But the simplicity is often its brilliance - the jokes are so familiar that they are now basically meta-commentary on its own bits! It's a well-oiled comedy machine.
HOW DID GARFIELD HANDLE CHRISTMAS?
In the very first Garfield Christmas strip, Davis was surprising in how sentimental he allowed Garfield to get right away (notice, also, how Garfield's design had not yet evolved into the famous version of the cat just yet). See Garfield basically get a personality transplant as he refers to us, the reader, as his loved ones...
This 1981 Christmas is notable to me just because it features Jon Arbuckle's friend, Lyman, who was also his roommate at the time. Lyman was the owner of Odie, while Jon was the owner of Garfield, but eventually, Lyman was written out of the strip and Odie simply became Jon's dog, as well...
The fascinating way that Davis allowed Garfield to get sentimental at Christmas continued in this 1986 strip, where Garfield is overly affectionate to his owner, Jon, in a way that is very much UN-like Garfield, and the cat even acknowledges it in the strip, and how the Christmas spirit plays a major role in it...
Jon's family, who live on a farm, were part of the strip since the early 1980s, but it is important to note that in 1987, the brilliant Garfield Christmas Special was released, which saw Jon, Garfield and Odie visit Jon's family on the farm for Christmas, and that special was a really big deal (it almost won an Emmy), and was repeated for a number of years (I'm sure you can still find it somewhere, and, of course, people upload it on YouTube and stuff like that), so it was only natural that in 1989, Davis would give us a tie-in to the special (to an extent) with Jon's family showing up...
One of the things that Davis does best on the strip is recurring gags. Lots of other comic strips have recurring gags, of course, but few have AS MANY recurring gags as Davis does in Garfield. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that he found a way to get a recurring gag into the Christmas strips of Garfield. The concept is that Garfield tries to stay up late to see Santa Claus, but, of course, he always falls asleep before Santa gets there, and Santa takes great delight in foiling Garfield's plot. In this 1992 strip, Santa takes Garfield's candy cane from him as he sleeps. In a much more recent strip, Santa even took a selfie with Garfield (and another strip referenced the fact that the gag is recurring by noting that Santa "loves tradition")..
As the years have gone by, Davis has leaned a BIT away from Garfield being overtly sentimental at Christmas, but that same basic idea still persists, like this 1997 strip where Garfield surprisingly even embraces Odie in honor of Christmas...
By far the biggest change in the Garfield comic strip over the years has been Liz's role in the strip. Liz has been in the series since almost the beginning, as Garfield's vet that Jon has a huge crush on (but who Liz thinks is kind of creepy). Well, in 2006, Jon and Liz finally started dating, and now 16 years later, they are firmly a couple. Here she is celebrating Christmas with Jon and the "boys" in 2013...
Come back tomorrow to see who the next comic strip featured is!