Is there anyone that doesn't like Garfield? Sure, there are people who think that Garfield is lame or difficult to work with, but does anyone actually hate him? His smug, tired demeanor, his hatred of all things Nermal and his unhealthy obsession with layered pasta have endured more than four decades. All these comics without a single joke.
That's unfair. Garfield may not be a fine joke Bordeaux to a guy that writes for a meme website. But to children, he has the deep flavors they crave because Garfield is for children. And like most things for children, people on the internet love to turn him into something monstrous, grotesque and violent for their own amusem*nt.
Since the early 2000s, Garfield has been of keen interest to memers, bloggers and internet comedians of all sorts. Nostalgia, combined with a wealth of material, made him one of the earliest cultural figures to be swallowed by meme culture. And, twenty years later, Weird Garfield or Creepy Garfield is as much a part of Garfield as hating Mondays.
But why Garfield? What is it about Jim Davis' creation that appeals to memers? Between 2004 and 2010, there was a growing interest in the character. Blogs like "Marmaduke Explained" and the "Comics Curmudgeon" appeared, annotating and dissecting Sunday comic strips in an endless search for the joke. "Comics Curmudgeon" founder Josh Fruhlinger says, "With some of the strips, like Garfield, it's often about trying to pull the comics apart like, 'why is this funny,' 'why is it funny in ways that it's not supposed to be?'' The joke for blogs like Comics Curmudgeon is in the details, breaking comics down into their discrete parts and coming to absurd conclusions about their intent.
Launched in 2004, the "Comics Curmudgeon" has spent nearly two decades pouring over the funny pages. Fruhlinger's work began at a time when comic strips were of keen interest to people online. Blogs like "Marmaduke Explained" and the Jim-Davis-approved "Garfield Minus Garfield" peeled back the child-friendly veneer to unearth another level of entertainment for people that may have outgrown their childhood love for orange cats.
The mid-00s were the beginning, in many ways, of meme culture. The technology to start meme-ing, remixing, and recontextualizing some of the world's most recognizable characters was in its nascent stage. "[This] was the beginning of a lot of the kind of remix stuff that we take for granted," says Fruhlinger. "More and more people had access to basic image editing software. This was also the beginning of Something Awful and the early days of the Chan boards." Around this time, people weren't just explaining why Garfield was weird but expressing it artistically. In 2007, Fatal Farm debuted "Lasagna Cat," a series of manic recreations of Garfield comics that spin out into music videos and art projects about the psycho-sexual struggle of Jon Arbuckle in a way that "Garfield Minus Garfield" only hinted at.
The Fatal Farm comedy duo, Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max began experimenting with online videos after finishing film school. Stumbling upon a ratty Garfield costume, they took inspiration from "Marmaduke Explained" and began translating Garfield strips, beat for beat and line for line, into fully-produced video shorts, hoping to highlight how not funny Garfield was. Initially, the team aimed to shoot 100 Garfield shorts based on 100 comic strips. After shooting 70 and editing a handful, they realized they had a big problem: "This is not fun to watch," says Zachary Johnson of Fatal Farm. "This is really boring." The early version of "Lasagna Cat" was a successful experiment if you're looking at it from the perspective of remaking Garfield. "They're about as funny as the comic itself," Jeffrey Max says. But Fatal Farm didn't want a strict recreation of Garfield. They wanted something funny. So they began building out the jokes that they found in the comic, taking them to absurd, psychedelic and, sometimes, disturbing heights.
"Lasagna Cat" inspired a wave of mutant Garfields, which, over the next decade, laid their eggs all over the internet. In 2013, YouTuber and animator PilotRedSun released "Garfielf," a crudely absurd take on the character in which Garfield's conventions are handled with meanspiritedness and ridiculous anger. Jon belittles Garfield, calling him "fat" and "lazy" repeatedly until the subtext of Garfield becomes the text. Memers took to the cartoon's menacing tone and scratchy drawing style and expanded "Garfielf" into a series of YouTube videos and image macros that continue to this day.
"Garfielf'' helped keep the world of Creepy Garfield variations alive. Over the next five years, Garfielf memers and comics artists had fun transforming Jim Davis' creation into a Lovecraftian monster. The trend culminated in William Burke's series about a monstrous, insect-like version of Garfield that stalks his owner Jon while searching for lasagna.
Burke's artwork became a staple of Creepy Garfield fan culture. Less than one month after Burke posted his first piece, Redditor theymademedarko launched the /r/imsorryjon subreddit, a place for fans to share the most horrific versions of Garfield they can find or create. To date, the group has more than 791,000 subscribers.
The popularity of /r/imsorryjon is a reflection of why people meme Garfield in the first place. "I think the reimagination of any well-known character is usually appreciated by those who remember the source material," writes WtvrBro, a 20-year-old German mod who's been working on /r/imsorryjon for more than a year. "A famous but fairly innocuous and family-friendly cartoon series being twisted into horrifying artwork is probably the most extreme example of this."
But there's a split on Reddit between fans of Garfield the character and fans of "Garfield" the meme. "We receive a lot of questions about how to prevent the sub from showing up on people's front pages," says WtvrBro. However, mods of /r/Garfield, a subreddit dedicated to classic Garfield, says that there's some crossover. "/r/Garfield is for discussion and posts relating to our favorite orange cat," writes spodermain, a /r/garfield mod of about two years. "Memes and jokes are still allowed, we just wanted to separate ourselves from the /r/ImSorryJon aesthetic. Some people want Garfield without the horror-inducing drawings. I've also found that there's a decent amount of children who posts their drawings and ideas on /r/Garfield, and I try to keep it clean for the new generation of Garfield fans."
To spodermain, there's room for both meme and clean interpretations of Davis' cat, and that's how fans like it. After all, without normal Garfield, there would be no Weird version. "I imagine most people are cross-subbed to the /r/ImSorryJon and /r/Garfield subreddits, although /r/ImSorryJon is much more popular. I've found that members post here to escape /r/ImSorryJon-style posts; those always get plenty of reports. /r/ImSorryJon posts align more with surreal memes in my eyes, and some of those posts have a lot of effort put into them. They just don't belong in this subreddit."
There's a market for disturbing versions of Garfield, but it's not just because those versions of Garfield are funny; it's that they're good. Really good. WtvrBro says that when he stumbled on the subreddit, he "was absolutely floored by the art by some of our top users, like u/Rojom, u/KikimoraBlue, u/SimulatedJoy, Lumpy Touch and Will Burke." Their efforts, he says, made the subreddit something more than just sh*tposts. "I believe that the fact that some users put hundreds of hours into making their artwork look genuinely good is a big reason for the genre's success."
Effort does go a long way within the Weird Garfield universe. When "Lasagna Cat" returned for a second series of videos, fans were struck by how much work went into the show. One episode ran more than four hours in length by repeating the same "knock-knock" joke until Jon has a mental unraveling over his own sexual inadequacy; another is an hour-long monologue about Garfield read by famed TV actor John Blyth Barrymore as Philip Glass' score to Martin Scorsese's Kundun plays in the background.
The dedication that goes into creating Weird Garfield memes cannot be solely for irony’s sake. Facebook groups like "Garfield Lasagnaposting" and "Garfield sh*tposting Inc." offer fans a place to both share ironic memes and express their real-deal love of Garfield. "There are lots of fans in the group that make sincere posts about their collections or fanart and stuff," says Liz, an admin for both groups. "I think to really meme something you have to love it a little unironically as well."
The line between irony and sincerity in these groups is blurry. Fans are sincere about their love of irony. And Garfield's mission is, according to Fruhlinger, "to make eight-year-olds aware of sarcasm." It all fits the Garfield milieu. But Garfield is such a part of the pop culture wallpaper that it's almost impossible for fans not to feel some ownership. "Much like The Simpsons, Garfield has become a sort of inescapable zeitgeist that people still love, regardless of how far past their prime they may be," says Neil, a D.C.-area mod on Lasagnaposting. "Some people make the memes to satirize and deride how far they've sold out, perhaps where the memes about 'drinking garfield's cum' are juxtaposing a family-friendly and clean character with suggestive punchlines." Of course, the drinking cum has its roots in the comic with perhaps one of the most infamous strips of its run.
Still, there's a sense that people meme Garfield because, well, they like him. They have grown up with him and may feel some connection or allegiance to him, despite not finding the comics particularly funny anymore. "Things like Shrek and Mario and Sonic and Pikachu all get skewered by adults who grew up with the stuff," says Zachary Johnson of Fatal Farm. "You outgrow the material because it's for children, but you remember it. You remember it fondly from your childhood. You just need to comment on it or change it in order to keep up with more mature tastes and humor."
Weird Garfield is a way to keep Garfield fans engaged with the character. It keeps the character alive and well in demographics that Paws, Inc. probably isn't actively targeting. Ultimately, who knows if Garfield would even be as famous today if it weren't for all the horror. Thankfully, we live in a world with plenty of lasagnas, for every kind of taste.
