Exploiting the Archives: The Mesmerizingly Tacky Mystery of Cowboy Garfield

If people know me for anything, it’s probably my weird obsession with Garfield. Oh sure, I like to claim that I began this website out of a hunger for creative freedom and artistic control, a need to make a living to support my growing family and an idealistic yearning to carve out a little place for myself and my writing in this cold world that’s pure and welcoming and warm. 

But the truth is that I created the Happy Place primarily so that I would have an outlet where my Garfield-themed pitches would never be rejected, no matter how flimsy or perversely inconsequential. 

Consequently, when I saw a Garfield tee-shirt online I instantly became hopelessly obsessed with, I thought, “Oh, there’s definitely at least a blog post in this.” As he almost always does, my inner boss gave me an enthusiastic green light because this blog is nothing if not a place for me to work through my feelings about the seemingly infinite different permutations of Garfield out there and what they say about us as a culture and a society. 

Not gonna lie: this seems homophobic.

The tee-shirt in question depicts Garfield with a look at once smug and cryptic sitting in a feline pose on a patch of grass while wearing what can very generously be deemed a blue cowboy hat and more accurately deemed a weird blue blob, a lazy yellow round sun in the background over the words, “When I die I may not go to heaven. I don’t know if they let cowboys in.” 

I have questions. 

I have a LOT of questions. How the hell is the cowboy hat staying on Garfield’s head? Is it glued on? Also, in what universe is Garfield a cowboy rather than a fat, belligerent suburban house cat who verbally and physically abuses the people and animals around him? 

Also, why is this novelty Garfield tee-shirt forcing me to think about death and the afterlife? Why wouldn’t cowboys be allowed into heaven? Is it because they’re sinners? Have they not accepted the Lord Christ as their personal savior? Have they done something horrible, individually or collectively, that would keep them from ever receiving the magnificent bounties of paradise? 

As a cultural archetype, the cowboy is a mythical figure, an endlessly romanticized paragon of macho, stoic self-reliance, a man’s man who makes an honest living with his rough, calloused hands and lives hard, fast and recklessly.

Does any of that describe Garfield? 

I would say that the tee-shirt is off brand except that Garfield is such a figure of pure kitsch and pure commerce that it’s easy to buy him selling just about anything, including the idea that Garfield is so invested in being a cowboy and the cowboy mythos that he’d seemingly be willing to forego sitting at the right hand of his Lord due to his lifestyle and rugged personal ethos. 

Garfield stands for nothing beyond making a buck. So he can be whatever merchandisers want him to be, even a cowboy worrying about what happens after you die. 

The amazing thing is that this is somehow not the only cowboy-themed Garfield tee-shirt on the market. There’s also one that somewhat confusingly features pretty much the same sad attempt at a cowboy hat but otherwise is a markedly different version of Garfield, one that’s more anthropomorphic and humanoid than the Garfield pondering whether he’ll spend eternity enduring the torments of the damned due to his dedication to the cowboy lifestyle. 

This hideous bit of comic strip camp conveys the more on-brand message, “What Do I Need With a Cowboy Hat When I Ain’t Got No Horsey”, which at least acknowledges that being a cowboy is the opposite of canonical for this fat cat.

Hating Mondays? Sure. Loving lasagna? Of course. Hating Odie and Nermal, to the point that he tortures both? Yesiree, bob! Being a cowboy? Fuck no. 

Ah, but it does not end there. Not by a long shot. There are even MORE cowboy Garfield cowboy tee-shirts, not to mention cowboy Garfield German greeting cards, cowboy Garfield flower pots, cowboy Garfield stuffed animals, cowboy Garfield figurines and all manner of other junk that combines cowboy iconography with Jim Davis’ billion dollar fat cat. 

Through sheer greed and indifference, cowboy Garfield somehow became a tacky little micro-industry hypnotic in its banality and weirdly mesmerizing in its tackiness. 

The relentless and surreal monetization of Garfield is so brazen and unashamed that it almost comes all the way around and becomes a weird form of purity. Garfield may be a total whore who is only in it for the money but at least he has the courage to be his truest, most ferociously mercenary self.  

Missed out on the Kickstarter campaign for The Weird A-Coloring to Al/The Weird A-Coloring to Al-Colored In Edition? You’re in luck, because you can still pre-order the books, and get all manner of nifty exclusives, by pledging over at https://the-weird-a-coloring-to-al-coloring-colored-in-books.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are EIGHT so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

and of course you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al here: https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

AND of course you can also pledge to this site and help keep the lights on at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace