Accidental Genius: Jim Davis

Welcome to the first of our occasional feature, Accidental Genius. In it, we profile someone who is (or appears to be) completely inept and yet ends up creating great works of art in spite of themselves. If we're lucky, this blog will mirror that formula. Moving on:

Garfield sucks. Ninety-nine percent of the the comics fall into the one of four streams: Garfield loves food; Garfield hates Mondays; Garfield is an asshole; and Jon's life sucks.





Jim Davis started Garfield as a cute and quirky comic back in 1978. Yes, thirty years ago. How do you keep a comic about a cat fresh for thirty years? You don't. But when you're raking in millions of dollars you can't exactly stop. Instead a team of writers (or maybe a bingo machine) randomly arranges the same stale jokes on and on forever.

So Jim Davis is a sellout, right? Well, yes. But it seems subconsciously he's a genius. A guy named Dan Walsh made the ingenious move of taking Garfield out of the strip and leaving only his long-suffering owner Jon Arbuckle. The result, in the words of Walsh, is "an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life."









Now that's hilarious. The best part is, this is how the comic really should be read. Jon can't read Garfield's thoughts, only the reader can. So this is the "real" view of Jon Arbuckle. It also works when you take out Garfield's thought bubbles.

So what can we learn from this? Davis asks us to suspend our disbelief so we can revel in Garfield's smart-alecry. But the strip works far better when you keep your disbelief and see it from an unintended point of view. If he had tried to make Jon the centre of the strip this never would have worked. Sometimes the most interesting characters and storylines are the ones we tend to overlook. It's like how everyone loved Joey in Friends but no one watched the show based on him. Exactly like that.

So thank you, Jim Davis. By writing a stale comic strip for decades you've taught us all a lesson about challenging our perspectives.

Oh, and if anyone still doesn't believe Davis is an accidental genius, remember that this is the guy that once killed Garfield in a masterfully ambiguous series that forever tinged the character with a depth and sadness unseen in comic strips, and didn't realize it.