garfield's death throes

Garfield is one of those comics that has existed forever and seems like it will never go away. It's the type of comic that recycles the same jokes over and over. I suspect that Jim Davis hasn't even drawn new panels in the last ten years; he just has templates with the speech bubbles blank and fills them in as needed.

But the only thing worse than a comic recycling its own jokes is a comic that has been depending on that method but then suddenly changes and breaks all its own rules. One of Garfield's running gags has been Jon's inability to get a date. But in recent months he has found a girlfriend, thus shattering the rules of Garfield's universe. In television it's known as "jumping the shark," a reference to a episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie ski jumps over a shark. Garfield should have ended long before this point, yet somehow it lives on. The wildly popular Garfield Chia head must be sustaining it.