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No. 5846: Appropriate Reaction

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Appropriate Reaction

First | Previous | 2025-05-21 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=5846

Strip by: KahnerC

{Royal fanfare plays}
Offscreen royal herald: Congratulations! You saved the princess!
{Odie returns from being congratulated for saving a princess and gives a thumbs up. Garfield returns the thumbs up, and Jon is appropriately happy}

The author writes:

Reading this strip without context, which is how most newspapers ran it, Jon's reaction can only be explained by anti-monarchist sentiment or jealousy.

Of course, the full context of Garfield's Gamer Week gives it a darker spin. Smuggled between the usual business of Jon being inept and whiny, and Garfield being mean, Jim Davis confesses that he does not love us. There's nothing wrong with a cartoonist thinking that gaming happens on a horseshoe with a five-button control scheme, or that the almighty technological advances of the twenty-five years prior amount to making Super Mario Brothers 1 talkier. There is something wrong with this happening in a comic strip which has been the basis of dozens of games. We will likely never see a strip that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how shirts, plushes, telephones, keyrings, movie tickets, beanbags, mugs, posters, etc work. What we get instead is this admission that neither Jim nor his crew have ever seen a controller in their lives, and that anyone who has is beneath them.

You can tell yourself that the strip was referencing the Segagaga Game Ball, or the Bandai Pippin, or some obscure plug-and-play, or that the team had only played the Windows versions and wanted to hint at a control scheme they didn't fully grasp. I want to believe too.

Original strips: 2010-02-27, 2021-03-28.