A Patron-Funded Exploration of a 1990 Garfield Business Manual Led Me Down a Rabbit Hole That Includes Garfield Shamelessly Ripping Off Love Is...
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
As readers are all too aware, I am moderately obsessed with Garfield, the Monday-hating, lasagna-loving misanthrope who embodies the commercial triumph of mediocrity.
I have written extensively about Garfield for this website because I can. I’ve written about Garfield’s appearance in the notorious anti-drug special Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, in a piece that was collected in The Joy of Trash.
not so much “By” Jim Davis as “lazily approved by Jim Davis
I’ve written about the fascinating shit show that is Garfield Eats, a uniquely misguided Garfield-themed pizza eatery as well as a Grumpy Cat/Garfield crossover comic book. But that’s not all! I wrote up a collection of strips from Garfield’s first year entitled Garfield: Year One and chronicled Garfield’s weird stint promoting cyber-safety for children.
I even wrote positively about Garfield once when Clint, guest Josh Frulinger and myself covered the trippy, surprisingly ambitious and audacious golden-age special Garfield and his Nine Lives.
So when a patron chose the Garfield-branded literary product The Me Book: a Guide to Superiority: How to Get It, Use It and Keep It for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I seized upon the opportunity to once again feed my obsession with Garfield.
The first thing I noticed about The Me Book is that it is very slight. Despite its title, it does not feel much like a book, in part because at eighty-eight pages it falls closer in length and tone to a pamphlet or a long article.
Those eighty-eight pages are hopelessly padded with illustrations and Garfield comic strips. The next thing I noticed was that the perpetually hands-off Davis was neither the book’s writer nor its illustrator.
Those dubious distinctions belong to writer Jim Kraft and illustrator Brett Koth. They were given the unenviable task of channelling the voice and personality of Jim Davis and his insanely lucrative creation with mixed success.
Garfield canonically eats, sleeps and antagonizes the people and animals around him. That’s all he does. He’s famously a lazy, hateful sack of shit. The Me Book transforms him into a 1980s style go-getter, a furrier Patrick Bateman without the body count who is all about climbing the corporate ladder.
Though it was released in 1990, the idea of Garfield writing a business manual feels like a coke-fueled 1980s conceit. After all, that weird orange guy with the crazy hair had written a very successful business manual in The Art of the Deal.
Why shouldn’t America’s favorite orange cat other than Heathcliff follow in Trump’s footsteps? Garfield is an arrogant wisenheimer with a big ego but that’s a pretty flimsy reason to posit him as an unlikely business guru.
The problem is that when you change an iconic character’s personality and goals as well as their medium, you end up with something that doesn’t feel like it has much to do with the ionic character at all.
That’s the case with The Me Book. It feels like someone wrote a half-assed, sub-mediocre mock-business manual and then shoe-horned in a few references to Jon and Odie and cynically passed it off as a Garfield book.
A dialogue between Sigmund Freud and an early patient, for example, feels more like a third-rate Woody Allen than Jim Davis, as evidenced by exchanges like the following:
Freda K.
(In my dream) I’m being chased in the woods by a giant bratwurst. Suddenly I fall in a deep hole. I’m falling and falling. I land on a train. The train goes faster and faster. There’s a man in black on the train. He shakes a rubber chicken at me. An elephant eats my hat. Fireworks explode. A chimp in a plaid suit tries to sell me life insurance. The train stops in Berlin. I ask the conductor, “Is this Berlin?” The conductor replies, “Do I look like cheese to you?” A rabbi and an Irishman get on the train. I’m frantic, because I can’t remember the rest of the joke. I’m just about to yodel when I wake up.”
Freud
I see. And how long have you been having this dream?
Freda K
Since I was five.
Freud
Which is when you witnessed that ugly incident involving your mama and papa, correct?
Freda K
What ugly incident? There was no…Act du Lieber! That’s it! When I was five years old, I saw papa pull a rubber chicken from his hat and snap it at mama, who immediately fainted. That’s what’s been haunting me all these years! (Leaps from chair) Thank you, Dr. Freud! Now I can lead a normal, healthy life!
That is all very rando and vaudevillian and not at all Garfield. A chapter on couture, meanwhile, loses some authority from the fact that in the comic strip Garfield does not wear clothes.
Tongue-in-cheek lists and quizzes and tips follow that run the gamut from borderline nonsensical and joke-free to mildly amusing.
I finished The Me Book in about an hour that was painless as well as pointless. Kraft manages some occasionally inspired bits, like a section on how specifically to talk down to people in different professions but they don’t seem to have a whole lot to do with the smug, small, predictable world that Jim Davis created in his comic strip and 1980s cartoon and specials.
Then again The Me Book is lazy and cynical. In that respect it’s true to both Garfield and his creator, who has happily repeated the same limp gags for over forty years now.
After reading Garfield: The Me Book I Googled Kraft’s name and was both surprised and not surprised to discover that it was far from Kraft’s only contribution to the field of Garfield literature.
It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Kraft has written only slightly fewer books about Garfield than Jim Davis has and many of his books are as surreally off-brand as The Me Book.
Kraft has written Garfield picture books for small children, Garfield chapter books and mysteries for slightly older children, Garfield joke books, Garfield scary joke books, multiple Garfield David Letterman-style Top Ten list books and Garfield guides to birthday parties and mornings.
But the most egregiously off-brand Garfield book in Kraft’s bibliography is For You, With Love, a book of “Garfisms of Affection.”
Reading the hideous portmanteau Garfisms I was reminded of my high school days as a video store clerk at Blockbuster. When Forrest Gump was released customers got a free book of “Gumpisms” with every purchase of a Forrest Gump video so we had to answer the phone, “Thank you for calling Blockbuster Video. Get a free book of Gumpisms with every purchase of Forrest Gump. How may I help you?”
What are “Garfisms of Affection?” They’re Garfield’s take on the maudlin pop aphorisms of Love Is…, the viscerally disturbing single panel comic strip about naked children in a loving romantic relationship.
Garfield and Love Is… are antithetical. Garfield is cynical, selfish and fundamentally nihilistic, a sociopath who cares about nothing beyond satisfying his base desires. Love Is… is syrupy, sticky-sweet and nauseatingly “romantic.”
Yet for the sake of squeezing even more money out of the faithful, Garfield morphs in For You, With Love into a true romantic and unabashed love bug who couldn’t more demonstrative in his affection for Jon and Odie.
For You, With Love is so shameless that it even borrows the format of Love Is… Sample entries include
*Love is surviving the toughest tests…like morning!”
*Love is a good back scratcher
*Love is making room under your umbrella
*Love is blind…or at least extremely short sighted
*Love is not always pretty
*Love is having someone to teeter your totter
*Love is little white lie…or sometimes a big one!
*Love is one song sung by two
*Love is sitting up with a sick friend
*Love is sharing your popcorn. True love is sharing the remote
*Love is splitting the last plate of pasta
*Love is the one gift you want returned
*Love is spending an evening with that special someone
Actually, those aren’t sample entries but rather THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE BOOK, OR RATHER “BOOK.”
That’s exactly one hundred and four words, if you’re counting. Not exactly War and Peace.
I foolishly imagined that The Me Book constituted a weird outlier in the wacky world of Garfield literature but after downloading several of Kraft’s creations I am horrified to discover that it’s fairly representative of his work in the field.
As bad and as lazy and cynical as The Me Book is, when it comes to Garfield literary product, it astonishingly could be even more egregiously off-brand, flimsy and lame and often is.
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