Scholars, sifting through the remainder of philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s papers, have located an essay in which Baudrillard declares:
The end of comics is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of comics. To this, we must add the Jim Davis comic, Garfield, which is not so much a comic as it is an ideology. Garfield is not an ideology that we can accept. It does not exist in the newspapers. It does not exist in our heads, hearts, and stomachs. We must look into the column inches occupied by Garfield and understand that it is not there.
It is unknown whether Baudrillard applied this criteria to all newspaper comics, but scholars are now sifting through notes Baudrillard had on The Family Circus, Marmaduke and Hagar the Horrible, all dismissed as (loosely translated from the French) “sucky comics.” But the general consensus so far is that Garfield, more than any other comic, spawned a deep animosity within Baudrillard.
This reminds me of a cartoon I saw once: Gorefield. It consisted of three panels. In the first two panels, ‘Gorefield’ somehow tormented the dumb mutt, the name of which escapes me, and pissed in Jon’s coffee. In the third panel, we saw Gorefield’s headless corpse, and Jon with Gorefield’s head in one hand and a bloody axe in the other, with the caption “Fuckin’ Cat!.”
Needless to say, this was a short-running strip, exhausting all the comic possibilities, if there were any, in the first installment. But it has stuck with me lo these many years.
Interesting.
Incidentally, I have a theory that Baudrillard isn’t real, but is in fact a fictional construct, accidentally spawned by an anomaly in the Ennui Field generated by hot air from French intellectuals talking.