Garfield is a daily newspaper comic strip starring the iconic orange cat of the same name as well as his owner John Arbuckle relatable Surly and adorable Garfield was based off the childhood memories of his creator Jim Davis so hungry and in the 40 years since we first met this lasagna loving Rascal Garfield has become a Global Phenomenon with yearly merchandising sales at an estimated the world is going to end I've been covering fandoms for a little while now and what I enjoy about doing this is how when you stare at a fandom long enough you begin to get this very distorted yet very honest reflection of its source material the heart of these Simpsons The Descent of Sonic the magnitude of undertale but then there's Garfield believe me when I say what Garfield has become on the Internet is the most bizarre fandom I've ever encountered and I'm not even talking about Garfield porn Here although yes there is totally that as well and yes I did have to [ __ ] up my Google analytics to find these no I'm talking about things far more bizarre which if you are not aware of allow me to give you a little preview or/ Alzheimer's group is a subreddit of 50,000 people reposting the same Garfield comic over and over and over each member roleplaying like this is the first time they've seen it relax John is an eight-part animated series in which a morbidly depressed John Arbuckle is dragged into a frightening alternate reality as he is subsumed by a demonic Garfield I'm sorry John actually Jesus no we're we're not ready for I'm sorry John but maybe in like an hour and maybe you've noticed the run time for this video and are asking how how could I possibly spend this much time on an idea that the subtle lowering of my father's eyebrows as I explained it to him communicated to me was something he considered a profound waste of time oh God I was I was meant to make a video about berserk this year but I just I got lost lost in Garfield God I hope it's worth it but the answer is I have looked deep into Garfield and I have seen things horrible frightening and beautiful including what is to me and I'm serious here the greatest piece of fan art ever created and I would like to show it all to you so join me on this long and strange Journey as we take our first step and ask a question how the [ __ ] did we get here from a cartoon cat who likes lasagna or to put it another way what is Garfield so I want to be honest here in that unlike the other fandoms I've covered for this channel I've never really been that into Garfield that's not to say I dislike Garfield it's just no no no I'm not doing this I do not need to humiliate myself for your amusement that's not to say I dislike Garfield just that I was never really into him as a kid and that hadn't changed changed up until this video and so my first call was to go looking for articles on the appeal of Garfield but what I found was kind of the opposite multiple headlines and videos about how Garfield is not funny and even was never meant to be how Jim Davis is a marketing man first and the comic was just intended as a vessel to sell merchandise and after reading a lot of Garfield and trust me I read a loss of Garfield I actually disagree I think this is a fairly synical mischaracterization of Jim Davis and can be traced back to a single quote he gave 40 years ago and is not really reflective of the dude of whom I have watched and read many many interviews who is the kind of person who still talks about wanting to make the whole world laugh with a single joke but if I'm right about this then why do so many people find Garfield unfunny and that being the case how has it survived for 40 years I'm about to be very generous with my interpretation of Garfield but I think it's important to do that because we need to understand the appeal here and while I am not going to defend the comedy in Garfield as we shall see later I find 104% of Garfield comics funny I do think however it's worth looking at the reasons why Garfield's humor gets such a polarizing reaction from people Jim Davis's previous comic before Garfield was Norm the natat which ended in 1975 he then spent 3 years doing well nothing before beginning Garfield in 1978 and to give that date a little context that is not this decade or the one before that or the one before that or the one before that or the one before that but the one before that barring the old gods of media like Mickey Mouse and peanuts Garfield has been around longer than practically any relevant character in pop culture today and you can imagine this lazy rude anti-authority cat being a little more outrageous in the late 70s than he is today in the same way these Simpsons and Sonic the Hedgehog would have seemed wild and countercultural in their day before it's slowly becoming mainstream that's exactly what happened Garfield we are just not old enough to remember it and Jim Davis has even talked about this in interviews that said I don't think the appeal of Garfield is its humor I think it's Garfield and what I mean by this is that we all want to be Garfield please don't click off the video I promise I have a point to make here think of everything you consider imperfect about yourself physical mental emotional whatever any perceived flaw that makes you feel shame now imagine an alternate version of yourself where those flaws still existed but you just accepted them you are in perfect harmony with who and what you are and that's it and well that's Garfield Garfield is lazy he's gluttonous he's selfish and people constantly make fun of him for being fat but he doesn't give a [ __ ] he is perfectly content in who and what he is and any of his perceived flaws are other people's problems not his and that is some seriously aspirational levels of confidence but the Real Genius of the character is he also has all these little traits that allow us to see ourselves in him Garfield hates Munday he likes coffee he loves lasagna he dislikes spiders loves to sleep and resents Authority these are all very general but what that means is that no matter who you are there's probably something in Garfield you're going to be able to relate to and that relatability combined with his more aspirational quality creates this simple but massively appealing cocktail of a character and I think it's the strength of that appeal that's let Garfield survive for 40 years and I just want to note here that for as messed up as things are going to get this video there is a lot of really cool and wholesome Garfield fan art from people who just earnestly enjoy Garfield's comic and his world one stand out being the fan comic John which tells the story of an older John arbole rediscovering his love of Art and cartooning and it's just this super cute and endearing take on these characters now granted you don't have to spend that long looking for Garfield fan art on the internet before things start to get strange like garamon a Blog in which one Intrepid Garfield artist has been redrawing the entirety of Pokemon as Garfield and I don't know how many there are because my browser crashes before I hit gen one but what I think is really interesting about garimon is it shows how iconic and malleable Garfield's visual design is meaning Garfield's visual design is recognizable enough to be twisted into to basically anything and still read as Garfield this will become horrifyingly relevant later but it's not just Garfield's character design that applies to but also the comic itself Garfield's comic was a big part of his spread designed to be as simple Timeless and consumable as possible each one is entirely self-contained and rarely if ever touches of current events and since even the early days of the internet and social media people have been taking these comics and changing them something that's possible because of how simple a formula they work off with each comic following the same three panel structure the first panel establishes the scenario it is the morning and John and Garfield have just woken up the second panel is the setup Garfield is in an unusually good mood and the third panel the punchline Garfield is in a good mood because he drinks too much Cofe coffee with the exception of the longer Sunday comics this is how Garfield works and just like the character himself that Simplicity was critical in letting as wide an audience as possible understand and enjoy Garfield but it's also that Simplicity that made the comic so infinitely memeable it is shockingly easy to make your own Garfield comic from splicing together different establishment setup and punchline panels and you can even try this yourself with the random Garfield comic generators and it's that malleability that's led to scores of popular online Trends such as replacing the last panel of a Garfield comic with an image of Garfield smoking a pipe and an unusual amount of these still work but my personal favorite is the same except the final panel now being Garfield being flung from a window however in time people also got much much weirder than that for example silent movie Garfield Garfield with one extra beat panel garfish Garfield with pixel art from that one really bad Garfield game that never released outside Japan Garfield but the drawing keeps getting lazier multiple choice Garfield Garfield except all the comics from 1978 are color average together real life Garfield uncomfortably close Garfield Garfield evolves into Noise two Garfield polarized Garfield you get the idea so Garfield is this iconic appealing character communicated through this simple but infinitely consumable and recreatable medium and I think this does go away in helping us understand the existence of something like or/ Alzheimer's group well there is something undeniably cruel about this subreddit I'd be lying if I said I didn't think there wasn't something interesting and even a little poetic here the idea that someone's final tether to their own reality is something as simple but recognizable as a Garfield comic strip and the tragedy of when even that twoo starts to fade however this still doesn't take us any closer to understanding why Garfield on the Internet is so you know and I think a real easy answer here is it's just the absurdity of making such depraved art out of something so simple and everyday but as you may be able to tell from from the remaining runtime on this video I disagree I think there's genuinely something darker and stranger at play here and I'm not even talking about the official Garfield's very occasional descent into something weirder I'm talking about a darkness that lies at the heart of every Garfield comic strip and to start to unravel what that is I want to talk about the 28th of January 20 8 when 27 very strange Garfield themed videos all simultaneously appeared on a previously unknown YouTube channel the kind of incredible thing about lasag Kat now is how weirdly ahead of its time it was this was 2008 and the term meme was still years away from becoming something people actually said and yeah lasagna made memes of Garfield comics but then became memes of themselves before you had even finished watching the video and what I mean by this is that each video of lasagna cat is broken into three sections the first is a liveaction recreation of A Garfield comic the second the actual comic on which the first section was based and the third and by far strangest section would take the footage of section one and change it so thisw would become thisw music video parodies video game references 2008 internet humor lasaga was taking Garfield comics and contorting them into all kinds of strange things but tantalizingly underneath the sheer wackiness of it all there was what felt like a very subtle distinct towards Garfield there was something a little grotesque and uncanny about these shrunken actors with their sagging costumes and human hands each skit ending with the same canned droning laughter that nearly highlighted the mundanity of these jokes Garfield this is a diagram of the food chain you're here and that's a mouse down there any questions where's Pizza but the strangest part was how each video ended on a bizarre tribute to Jim Davis this is one of the first really unusual things I noticed about the Garfield fandom it has this kind of feverish obsession with Garfield's Creator Jim Davis and I say unusual because in every other fandom I've covered I don't know if I remember a single instance of the creator of those properties ever appearing in fanworks but Garfield is different over and over Davis kept materializing in fan works often in very strange ways and to the best of my knowledge lasaga was the first instance of this happening so why well if that was a question you asked in 2008 you'd be waiting a long time for an answer after the initial upload day of lasagna cat the channel would go silent days would become weeks weeks would become months and months would become years and without a single update lasagna cat began to fade into internet obscurity which is why it was such a shock when a full 9 years later a new video appeared on the lasagna cat Channel ending with the text telephone sex survey February 9th 2017 this was the beginning of a strange Rabbit Hole of videos that led two weeks later to a bizarrely high production trailer that claimed if you called a toll-free number and left your name and the number of sexual partners you'd had A Garfield web series would return two weeks later and boom just like they had nine years ago 11 new videos were simultaneously uploaded to lasagna cat and while they were similar in format to the old videos they were also so so different the first of the new videos begins as any typical lasaka would parodying an old comic where Garfield steals Jon's pipe but what's waiting for us at the end of the video isn't a re-slicing of the footage from section one that we're used to but a man claiming that this simple Garfield comic transformed his entire existence as he obsessively analyzes every tiny part of the comic in excruciating detail his examination gradually expanding outward to the immortal nature of Art and mimic culture and its ability to transcend Humanity and even the laws of space and time and this goes on for an entire hour and it might just be the best video on the internet and somehow this was just the beginning whereas the original end of video skits had that Charming amateur with a green screen feel what waited for us in the third Act of these videos now were shockingly high production short films that transformed simple Garfield comics into to these elaborate surreal stories jokes about ODI getting a bag stuck on his head morphed into these Strange Tales of the baghe headed ODI becoming a fashion icon before taking his own life and being condemned by Garfield to a hell filled with demonic John Arbuckle Camas gags where John uses the wrong shampoo would now be mutated into well this this is what they would turn into and I don't want to describe this those simple Garfield jokes were now being contorted to the bizarrest of extremes contrasting the arguable mundanity of the original with this just wild insanity and even more pronounced this time was that subtle malice towards Garfield each video still ending on those bizarre tributes to Jim Davis but it's only in the final video ever uploaded to the channel That lasania cat would reveal what it truly was and that video was called sex survey results sex survey results begins with John Arbuckle entering his living room and sitting down to read the paper but he hears a knock on his door and who's there to which he answers revealing a strange white mannequin the mannequin giving its name and number of sexual partners hey my name is Garrick Smith and I have had exactly zero sex partners before the scene freeze frames and pulls out to reveal a near identical scene and we begin again but now with Garfield instead of John the same events play out only with a new piece of audio detailing someone else's his name and number of sexual partners and we cycle again but now with Odie and then again back to John and then again and again and again and again and again and this continues for nearly five hours all of which I have watched most of which I did live on stream watching sex survey results in its entirety is exhausting an exercise in mind no repetition but I think there's something kind of important in that experience you're listening to all these different recordings of people communicating what is to many a pretty sensitive piece of information and it's weird and even a little uncomfortable but soon you just go numb to it after an hour it stops feeling weird and after hours it stops feeling like anything because anything repeated enough times loses all meaning not on like a comic strip running day after day after day after day after day for 40 years and it's at that point when that feeling is at its strongest and you are completely numb to whatever is happening that lasagna cat hits you with what has to be one of the most Infamous and shocking pieces of footage that is allowed to exist on YouTube at this point the scene has descended into night the mannequins have begun to take strange and grotesque shapes and JN answers the door one final time only to be faced [Music] with John Arbuckle too [Laughter] John Arbuckle zero and immediately this second John ages about 30 years this new older John Arbuckle now wandering the streets alone frightened and confused he finds a dried out husk of a cat which teleports him to a massive Ravine where he encounters is a strange naked Shaman who attacks him before teleporting behind him and Whispering silent words in his ear before Jon collapses into a pile of worms and dirt the shaman Roars and we hardcut to a young girl screaming in the bathroom of a public school we given extreme closeups of her birthing a stillborn child and she steps back and stares down in horror before saying something in Polish the she leaves and we get one final shot of the child but now a ginger cat is perched beside it we could the cat is now gone and the baby opens its eyes before the screen is filled with a block of bright orange well that was a nightmare but I actually think that lasagna cat has something really interesting to say but to get there we're going to have to do a little leg work earlier in this video we asked what is Garfield but now I would like to ask what is Garfield considering I'd had little history with Garfield I knew to answer this I would need to immerse myself in him to understand the comic on an intimate level and so I committed to reading 400 Garfield comics but not just that I wish to study them and so I didn't just read Garfield I collected data onar Garfield I noted every observation I had in a large Google spreadsheet and through this I established that Garfield was made up of roughly 11 different kinds of jokes such as humor derived from the fact that Garfield is lazy SL gluttonous absurdist humor relatable humor other humor which were either recurring jokes too sportic for their own category but mainly jokes about Garfield's doing things a cat would do the joke being that he's a cat or jokes about Garfield doing things a cat would not do the joke being he's a cat these are my least favorite kind of Garfield joke I measured for a variety of other variables such as the amount of fourth wall breaks which was four or instances of Garfield becoming suicidal which was two or how many times the comic made me laugh which was precise ly once and it was this one after many many hours of collecting Garfield data I sought to answer a single question that would surely help me understand Garfield and by extension lasagna cat what was the most common type of joke in Garfield and when I tabulated the results what I saw shook me what was I looking at this couldn't be possible and I grew concerned the 400 Comics I I had pulled from were a combination of every comic on the Twitter account random Garfield which algorithmically pulls three random Garfield comics every day as well as this YouTube video ranking the top 100 Garfield comics perhaps this video was a mistake its author's biases tainting my study so I proceeded to read 200 more Garfield comics chosen completely at random from Garfield's web art arive I tallied the numbers again and no impossible this time the results were even more pronounced was I was I subconsciously selecting Garfield comics to affirm my own biases I couldn't allow this and so I committed to reading an entire year of Garfield each month being selected from three and fouryear intervals across Garfield's for decades bringing my total number of red Garfield comics to 9 56 but then I was struck with an idea what if I committed to reading every Garfield comic in existence then my data would be pure complete and indisputable this is when I encountered a problem when I sought out the estimated total number of Garfield comics in existence that number was 14,000 but how was there that many this video was already taking far too long and at this point I'd already spent several days reading Garfield comics and yet somehow I had only consumed 6.83% of all Garfield for not the last time this video The Very concept of Garfield began to feel gargantuan and impossible entirely beyond the grasp of my feeble mortal consciousness I decided that reading 14,000 Garfield comics was not a realistic goal I know some of you will consider this a failure I am sorry I read up on Sample sizes and learned that my current yield of Garfield comics will leave me with a margin of error of about 1.5% and this is widely considered acceptable I sigh and proceed forward I tally the final numbers and rank each strain of Garfield joke from 11 to 1 the results frighten me I am now going to share this specific breakdown with you because I need you to see what I see before we begin I want you to ask yourself a question what do you think is the most common type of joke in Garfield and I want you to hold on to that guess as we proceed down the list at number 11 we have jokes centered around Irma the local cafe owner and how she's bad at running her business these jokes make up just 42% of Garfield just above that at number 10 with. 5% were jokes based around Garfield's girlfriend Arlene at number nine with 1% was humor derived from how much Garfield hates nural at number eight with 2.3% is comedy conveying Garfield's hatred of spiders at number seven with 4.5% was relatable humor this was the first major surprise to me I had assumed that a cat whose entire branding was built on one simple relatable quote would have more relatable humor in its comic I was wrong and it wouldn't be the last time at number six at 4.7% was Whimsy derived from Garfield's abuse of ODI at number five with 13.7% was mildly surreal and absurd as tumor at number four with 16.8% are jokes based on Garfield being lazy or gluttonous and again for obvious reasons I was shocked not to see this further up the list at number three with 17.4% is other these are the kinds of jokes I do not like and at number two with 18.8% is a mystery category that I will reveal much later in the video for dramatic effect now before I unveil number one I want to stop and ask you again what do you think is the most common type of joke in Garfield at number one and by far the biggest shock on the list was a category I never even would have guessed existed and it's called John is pathetic John Arbuckle is 30 years old he lives alone has no real friends outside his dog and cat and is constantly lonely and these are all things that the Garfield comic takes joy in ridiculing a typical Jon is pathetic gag works like this JN says he's not going to call women for dates anymore that he's going to wait for them to approach him we see him waiting and then we see him waiting what appears to be several months later jokes like this are very common not just in how women find Jon actively repulsive but in how he is pathetic and should be ridiculed and you can see this in how the comic portrays his intelligence his Hobbies his fashion sense to even his physical strength and inadequacy in anything that could be considered remotely masculine across nearly 1,000 Comics I measured zero cases of Jon showing any admirable qualities meaning whereas Garfield is something to be aspired to John is something to be laughed at even when Jon did find a girlfriend in Liz 28 eight years into Garfield's run and only after fans begged Jim Davis to end Jon's loneliness he's still treated as this pathetic character and I think there's something kind of sad about that a person whose only purpose is to be ridiculed and to be trapped in that existence for 40 years and where this gets even sadder is when you start to consider the comic from John's perspective across that same range of comics I measured 156 instances of Jon displaying some kind of negative emotion or mental anguish anger depression lethargy but if you're a casual reader of the comics it might never feel like that as whenever JN does begin to sink into despair Garfield is there to deliver a witty punchline and diffuse the tension but here is where we start to get into the very strange nature of reality and Garfield see as the audience as the readers of this comic we can experience Garfield's thoughts through the visual device of thought bubbles but critically this is not the case for John across every Garfield comic I read I didn't record a single instance of John ever directly reacting to Garfield's thoughts in a way that couldn't be explained by him intuiting Garfield's body language and expression and that information is critical because it means the reality we are experiencing and the one John is experiencing are entirely different and this brings us to a question what is it really like being John arbu on the 13th of February 2008 A Garfield fan comic was uploaded to Tumblr and it looked just like a regular Garfield comic but with one critical difference the first panel depicted John sitting alone with the dialogue I've done things in my life that I regret the second panel shows nothing just John his remorseful silence unbroken the final panel of the comic punctuated by nothing just a slight shift in Jon's expression like his regrets are washing over him what this was was just a regular Garfield strip with one key difference Garfield had been removed and because of the very specific way John and Garfield communicate the comic still works but whereas before Garfield's punch lines could distract us from Jon's misery that's no longer the case and this was the beginning of the bizarre and morbid web comic Garfield Minus Garfield which lets us experience the true crushing reality of John and some of these Comics are really haunting there's one in particular that is either very hopeful or very devastating depending on your perspective where John says we can't do anything about the past but we can do something about the future before he just disappears Garfield Minus Garfield was not the first instance of people moving Garfield from the comic to produce this kind of effect but it was what popularized the idea online that there may be something very wrong with John Arbuckle and over time other fanworks began to explore this in similar ways realistic Garfield for example conveyed similar themes by just replacing Garfield with a realistic cat who could not talk as did fan Comics like Arbuckle while animations like meat Canyon's lasagna brought the idea of John's fra reality even further depicting Jon as a frightening delusional lunatic who holds his terrified victims captive and forces them to play the part of Garfield and ODI as he warps back and forth between the John Arbuckle we know from the comics and something much much darker the reason all these pieces are important is that they show not only that there is something kind of wrong with John Arbuckle but also that that is something that even in the early days of Garfield's online fandom people picked up on but where things get even stranger is when we look at this through the lens of what John arbu was originally meant to be remember earlier when I said that normat ended in 1975 Jim Davis then spent 3 years doing nothing and Garfield started in 1978 well that was a lie but I framed it this way because for decades that's what people thought was The Truth Listen to any interview in which Jim Davis speaks about the origins of Garfield and he'll wheel out the same anecdote about the failure of Norm not because insects are not appealing characters and how that realization led to him looking at dog Centric Comics like peanuts and maradu and saying to himself what if I can create a similar character but for people who like cats and thus Garfield was born except this version of events also ignores the existence of heathcliffe another Surly round orange cat who predates Garfield by about 5 years and this isn't relevant at all but I just think it's funny however this telling is a lie or at least not the full truth because you see in the period between 1975 and 1978 there was a third comic one that was only discovered in 2019 by Intrepid Garfield historian Quinton reviews and this comic was simply titled John there are two very strange things about JN the first being how closely it resembles Garfield everything from jokes to entire layouts are repeated across the two series The only difference being that the main character here is John Davis has spoken a lot about how John Arbuckle is an analog for him both grew up on a farm both live in Muny Indiana and both are cartoonists in fact Davis originally wanted to use the character of Jon as a way to voice his frustration with the comic strip industry which if you look at where Davis was in his life when he first started writing this character that tracks JN started just two weeks after the failure of one not and you can feel that frustration in these early comics in one instance JN even turning to the camera and saying how he thinks the content of this comic will land him in trouble with parents groups and while Garfield still featured heavily there were strips where he just didn't appear at all with scenarios more focused on observational humor derived from the perspective of a single man but it wasn't long into the ruin when that started to change with jokes more and more centering around Garfield and not JN the final strip of John being published on August 8th 1977 the strip returning a week later but now named Garfield and within a year Garfield would be syndicated on a national level becoming the newer version of the comic we are all now familiar with the second thing I find so strange about JN is that while Jim Davis is often happy to laugh about the failure of Norm natat he barely ever speaks about Jon and when he does he only talks about in the vaguest of terms as if it was an idea in his Sketchbook as opposed to an actual published comic and I can't help but wonder if there's something to that if the idea of a comic that was meant to be his own perspective his own Outlet on life was a failure overtaken by a fictional character he created even stranger as Garfield went on the similarities between Jim Davis and John Arbuckle began to disappear John's job as a car tonist practically Vanishing as he devolves into the pathetic shell of a man we now know and I'm not saying here that I think Jim Davis has some Dee rooted trauma that is manifesting in his Daily newspaper comic I genuinely do not think that but I do think that this perspective adds a lot to this strange meta Narrative of a man overtaken by his own creation abandoning the character he once embodied and that character now know being trapped in a life of existential suffering and here's the thing if I was the only person who saw this then there wouldn't be a story here but I'm not let's go back to those last five minutes of lasagna cat lasagna cat ended two years before the discovery of John but even then what John adds to lasagna cat is kind of chilling like in that final scene when that 2 John 8 es he begins to Bear a striking resemblance to Jim Davis the person we now know John was originally meant to be this new strange combination of Jim Davis and John Arbuckle lost and clinging to the husk of a cat he should have let go of a long time ago before he comes face to face with a version of Garfield that's become independent from him and is now strange and frightening before Davis crumbles to Earth outlived by the very thing he created which is immediately followed by the bathroom scene and what's interesting here is that if we translate the girl's monologue from polish it reads this child isn't mine this child is from the darkness I've given birth to Humanity's curse my soul will be swallowed and vomited and swallowed again forever sick joke but no one is laughing my blood will remain death isn't the end I am in hell this is hell and while I can't show it on screen in that final shot the baby is shown wearing a blue shirt identical to John our bookal for pieces of art like this I think there is a lot of different interpretations that you can make but for me personally when lasat is taken in totality it becomes this bizarre statement on what happens when the things you create become more powerful than you how Garfield has become this semi-immortal entity evolving past both John Arbuckle and Jim Davis and I mean this literally Garfield is no longer even created by just Jim Davis he has an entire team of people working under him who have become so Adept at creating Garfield their work is now indistinguishable from his and Davis has even spoken about selecting a replacement so that Garfield can continue long after he's gone but here's the thing it's not just Jim Davis's reality that g Garfield has had this strange effect on it's also ours that might sound weird I mean how relevant could Garfield actually be in the modern era well if I was to ask you which character out of Superman Goku and Garfield was the most syndicated which would you pick and if you picked any answer other than Garfield well that was a strange Choice given the subject of this video but yeah it is Garfield after multiple decades in thousands of worldwide newspapers Garfield has an estimated audience in the hundreds of millions the New York Times had to change how its trade bestseller list was categorized after seven of its 10 slots were occupied by Garfield and today his merchandising sales are at an estimated 800 million to $1 billion and that is a lot to sell in 40 years oh wait wait wait that's every year that's every [ __ ] year in products that twist Garfield into every conceivable form you can imagine for example Garfield soap Garfield air fresheners Garfield cushions Garfield teapots a poster with Garfield as a ninja Garfield headphone holders Garfield thermostat Garfield commemorative coin Garfield digital alarm clock Garfield keyhanger Garfield Piggy Bank Garfield Walkman Garfield field Globe Garfield ice skates Garfield boxing gloves how to insult your friends Garfield book Garfield web browser Garfield amusement park ride Garfield personal massager A Garfield mug another Garfield mug a much Dumber Garfield mug A Garfield mug that is even dumber than the first dumb Garfield mug existential Garfield another existential Garfield slightly too many Irish stereotype Garfield Garfield waste coat unwell Garfield Garfield gun Satan Garfield slime Garfield child Garfield illegal Garfield another [ __ ] Garfield mug I don't know what this is table Garfield yet another table Garfield Garfield prison tray sex Garfield M far too large Garfield nightmare Garfield this horrifying bed sheet the deeply cursed Garfield eats what what is this why this Garfield jigsaw which for some reason I can't quite pin down puts the fear of God me in the mid 880s a small coastal French Village began to suffer an unusual phenomenon when plastic Garfield phones began washing up on shore no one knew where they came from or why this was happening but it continued for three decades a mystery that was only solved in 2019 when the mysterious phones were traced back to a lost shipping container we have so saturated this planet with Garfield merchandise that even the Earth herself has has begun to reject it but if that's the case why don't we notice scarfield more why don't we see him everywhere in every day and the answer is because they don't want us to in the early 1980s a production accident led to A Garfield plush with suction cups attached to its hands and feet pause Inc the holding company for Garfield didn't expect what was a botched product to sell well which is why it was such a shock when the toy was so popular it led to a wave of car break-ins where radios and purses were left behind and only the plush was stolen sales climbing to a staggering $50 million and what did Jim Davis and pause ink do we pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years they didn't want Garfield to be a fad they wanted to silently inject him in into every part of our daily lives where he could hide in plain sight silently growing into one of the most dominant fictional characters on the planet and here's the thing they succeeded what I'm about to tell you is not a joke this is not Some Space Jam 2es Jinks this all happened over the course of making this video an experience I call the go Garfield phenomenon it began in small ways at first I'd be watching a TV show and oh hey there was Garfield I look at Instagram and huh my my friends were posting about Garfield and oh a text I guess Chris Pratt is playing Garfield in the new Garfield movie that's strange timing wait why is Toby Fox talking about Garfield and and sexy goth Garfield began trending on Twitter I I began to feel slightly uneasy so maybe I'll just try and relax and look at some gaming news and oh hey I guess Garfield's the new character in that smash Nickelodeon fighting game isn't that grand I'd been watching rezero which I did not like very much and someone told me that Garfield appeared in the second season which just can't be true and what the [ __ ] a friend sent me a picture of a mural in an old house and there was Garfield staring at me with what I can only describe as some kind of all knowing contempt I was now doing whatever I could not to think about Garfield and I agreed to watch the first episode of the new Dexter with my partner and wow yeah I can only imagine but wants to call him Garfield I mean who what what the [ __ ] what the [ __ ] did he just say calm down calm down everywhere I looked I saw Garfield but why why was this happening now well that answer would come to me and it did so in the form of a phone [Music] call hello hi son oh hey ma'am how's it going John I know you're working on your video of Garfield at the moment so guess what I found the picture of you with your Garfield oh Ma'am uh I don't think that was me I was never actually do into Garfield so earlier in this video when I said that I was never into Garfield that was true I I don't remember this I don't remember owning this massive Garfield doll but that is me and that is my mom and this happened I just don't remember and this is when it started to click that when you look for Garfield you begin to find him everywhere even in the past this is the Garfield phenomenon Garfield is all around us and he always has been we just never noticed but my eyes are open and now so are yours if an alien race dug through a ruined Earth they would think we worshiped Garfield and they would be right these are the three keys in unlocking what Garfield has become on the internet a daily newspaper comic strip designed to be as simple and consumable as possible but because of this becomes un intentionally malleable and recreatable spreading edits of it online one of which unknowingly touches of a bizarre metan Narrative of a man being overtaken by his own creation that Creation in time becoming an entity onto itself one that has laid just outside the perception of man for 40 years and will remain there for infinitely more transcending Humanity itself self this is the bizarre modern reality of Garfield and now that we understand it we may enter the world of I'm sorry John on October 22nd 2013 a comic was uploaded to the internet that showed John Arbuckle awaking late one night but something is wrong something is very wrong his room is bathed in an eerie orange glow a strange material covering his walls his furniture and his entire home he goes downstairs to try and discover the source of this problem and upon entering the kitchen he sees Garfield his cat's strange swollen head bizarrely embedded in the wall his skin spreading outward covering every surface of his home I was so hungry as John realizes with horror his entire home with him in it have been ingested by Garfield I'm sorry John this was the beginning and in the years to follow more and more strange and frightening depictions of Garfield would begin to appear on the internet Comics that looked normal at first only to take disturbing turns with Garfield often portrayed as something alien and unknowable one of the most popular of which was 2017's gramfel a Darkly humorous web comic whose early Pages were focused on Jon's depression met by an uncaring nihilistic gramfel but as the comic continued gramfel began to reveal to JN not only the inherent unhappiness of life but the futility of his existence as a character trapped in a web com I breaking Jon down to his core components and trapping him in strange and surreal realities over and over at one point even transforming the very web comic of granell itself into a different series called Jan and Graham in which Jon gets to live out the cute and peaceful life he's always wanted before Jon is ripped from his Serene dream and in the final page is forced to acknowledge that he is alone and he always will be what I find so fascinating about gramfel is it's that same Dynamic of JN and Garfield just brought to a cosmically nihilistic extreme this was the core concept of what would inform everything that was to come but notably gramfel never felt truly frightening or disturbing because of the simple pastel cuteness of its aesthetic and if the horror of Garfield on the internet was going to truly solidify it needed an aesthetic and in the following year it would get it in 2018 an image would be uploaded to Instagram from horror artist will Burke one that depicted a horrifyingly bloated Garfield clutching a tiny frightened John with a text John I require lasagna something about this image resonated with people and it became wildly popular online becoming the first in a series of five illustrations each one depicting Garfield as a grotesque swollen monstrosity his form swimming between heaving mounds of Flesh and sharp insect-like appendages as he hunted johon through his home and while the sheer horror of seeing Garfield Twisted into such nightmarish forms were a huge part of the power of these images critically they also captured the kind of hopelessness of the character of John Arbuckle but channeled it into pure horror one illustration showing JN terrified and clutching a shotgun as a grotesque centipede like Garfield emerges through the door behind him with text that reads bullets don't work John the final image of this series depicting a gargantuan Garfield now towering over a helpless terrified Jon as Whispers the world is going to end John these images would Rampage across the internet being posted reposted and upvoted tens of thousands of times and would become the blueprint for everything Garfield would become online as different artists began to create their own interpretations of Burke's work such as animator lumpy touch who took Burke's illustrations and reimagined them through stunning and horrifying pixel art animations not only giving these still images a new horrifying Dimension through movements but also reframing them as a 2d survival horror video game lumpy touch taking this concept even further later on with both a firstperson expiration Recreation of the original I'm sorry John comic as well as creating a tutorial for his own fake Garfield survival horror game in which the player is hunted by one of 13 Gore Fields all based on the different zodiac signs and what I really love about this is you can see that kind of existential horror introduced by granell as well as the more grotesque body horror introduced by Burke now being spliced with other mediums and genres of horror and you could see this continue to evolve in other illustrations like those of artist Omega black who took the idea of Garfield horror and introduced a cosmic eldrich feel like this image in which Garfield States I no longer require eyes John which I am pretty sure is a reference to the 1997 film Event Horizon a sci-fi horror in which a group of astronauts board a lost Starship that has returned from Hell featuring the infamous line where going we won't need eyes to see Omega bl's other illustrations only expand on this lovecraftian style of Garfield horror with a grotesque centipede like Garfield stating Heaven is a void of Life John or Jon being held captive by cloaked Odis before an impossibly massive multiarmed Garfield booms I'm Eternal John each new piece of Garfield fwn art added to this idea of Garfield as a cosmic horrifying being sometimes referred to to as creepy Garfield or Garfield and this is what led to October 8th 2018 and the creation of the subreddit or slash I'm sorry John there's nearly a Cults like feel to I'm sorry John it's title plaque reading Garfield has abandoned his limited form and he is beautiful surrender yourself to him and be saved this is a community of nearly 800,000 people dedicated to Bringing to life this new version of Garfield the internet has created as well as his infinite torment of John Arbuckle and maybe like I did you thinking no Garfield's not evil he's not trying to hurt John it's not like that mystery number two category of Garfield joke is in fact humor based off Garfield's torment of John but that's right at 18.8% nearly one in five Garfield jokes center around Garfield causing Jon mental anguish and it's not just that another variable I measured for was the amount of times Garfield showed empathy towards Jon or tried to comfort his suffering in any way and across nearly 1,000 Comics that number was zero so in the same way Garfield Minus Garfield reveals something real if unintentional about Garfield the same is true in I'm sorry John Garfield has always been about a person trapped with a cold nihilistic being that torments him and it's been that way for 40 years and all that or/ I'm sorry John does is bring that concept to a horrifying extreme dream this is the reason I think so many pieces on I'm sorry John have this odd kind of power to them their horror is rooted in being trapped with something awful and inescapable but what's really fascinating about the horror of I'm sorry John is how different artists have approached this idea in different ways I like categorizing things so I've identified what I think are three basic kinds of horror on I'm sorry John the first being physical Garfield horror these are pieces that twist Garfield into strange and frightening creatures sometimes into amalgamations of unsettling body horror but more often swelling Garfield to such nightmarish proportions that there is no chance of Jon ever defeating escaping or even surviving these grotesque beasts Garfield has become and what's interesting here is how many of these pieces evoke or even directly reference the from soft games Dark Souls and bloodborne which themselves create a lot of their horror and Emotion by forcing you into battles with these massive and horrifying creatures that feel impossible to overcome it's that kind of physical hopelessness that these pieces create and just like those games the more extreme examples of this kind of Garfield horror carry a cosmic nearly lovecraftian feel as Garfield is now so so large so impossible that he begins to feel like some kind of terrible diety a being of such immense power and scale that it throws into chaos our own sense of Humanity's place in the universe whether we really are the dominant species we've always assumed or just dust in the wake of something much greater I just read that line and I can't believe we're talking about [ __ ] Garfield the second type of Garfield horror is more intimate and psychological here it's less that Garfield is a physical threat as much as it is the subtle Insidious damage he's doing to Jon's mental state sometimes in the form of an awful malicious creature who constantly follows Jon and gos him driving him to do terrible things but sometimes as a delusional presence in Jon's own mind a manifestation of his internal struggles be they depression addiction or or worse in a way that feels similar to your trap John in these impossible and infinite Lial spaces where there is no escape and he will forever be haunted by Garfield but other scenarios are more elaborate like when even death itself can't release Jon from Garfield's grasp showing Garfield as this Immortal unending being who will always return to plague Jon or even the opposite like in this one comic where Jon takes his own life to escape Garfield only to be brought back to life by him so his suffering can continue other pieces are stranger and even more abstract like showing Garfield as these grotesque physical parasites that have attached themselves to Jon and are feeding off him while he is trapped in these strange unending dream worlds and I think where this particular kind of horror gets really powerful is when it's combined with the more psychological type of Garfield horor we just talked about like lumpy touches relax John which we mentioned earlier and what I think is so great about this animation is it shows Jon returning home late one night at his most broken his life now destroyed having lost his job Liz and even ODI and it's at this point when he's at his absolute lowest that he is most vulnerable to a being like Garfield who offers Jon an escape from his miserable exist existence in the form of comfort but in reality drags him into a frightening Nightmare and I love this so much because it is such a fantastic example of what Garfield has become on the internet Garfield is despair he's the part of Jon that makes him feel weak and insignificant who pulls him down and traps him in realities dark and frightening that is the core horror of Garfield and I'm sorry John it's interesting to note that this concept has only continued to evolve online in sub communities like your welcome John which is a more wholesome if still very disturbing relationship between Jon and a cosmically nightmarish Garfield as well as or slash I'm really sorry John which I cannot even talk about if this video has any hope of staying monetized hey uh by the way this this video is nearly definitely going to be demonetized and so I have a patreon there's one deer it's $1 so yeah but hey look either way I appreciate you watching you can even see this very defined kind of Garfield horror being transplanted onto other fictional series with I'm sorry John's occasional non-garfield weekends and while I really love these pieces Ernie how do I look with with your eyes B with your eyes God that's so good I think it's interesting how at least to me they never quite carry the same level of impact or meaning as those based on Garfield not only because of how deeply rooted the horror of I'm sorry John is in the very core of Garfield but also in how when taken with everything else we've talked about today these pieces begin to transform what these characters are and in particular John Arbuckle when I started this video all John was was this chubby dude but over time that started to change I watched him go from this character with a very defined purpose and reason for existing to someone who loses that purpose and becomes to the world around them a pathetic joke and it's like that experience causes this deep emptiness to well up inside them a despair that makes life feel meaningless and impossible in a way that the Garfield comic can barely contain till one day that despair begins to manifest as Garfield an entity that traps JN in this deep and horrifying delusion warping every part of his reality this entity with with each passing day growing stronger and more frightening as JN Falls deeper into Despair and when I think of this late stage of Jon's existence there's one artist in particular that comes to mind part of what makes Ram's work so powerful and frightening is how intimately they seem to understand each particular kind of Garfield horror some pieces show Garfield as these massive monst ous beasts whose mere existence conveys this horrifying physical futility others show Garfield as this gargantuan and grotesque parasite as this Insidious Force that's been with Jon since the moment he was born and for years has manipulated and contorted every part of his life draining John until finally Garfield has grown so powerful that he's now more a god than anything else so infinite Cosmic and terrifying that he's become John's entire reality and John now just a speck of dust hopeless and terrified in the face of this thing that he created till the end of time and I think there's something really powerful about these images the beautiful thing about hor horor is it lets us externalize the things that haunt us and when I look at the work of Omega black or lumpy touch or Ram what I see is a person struggling someone whose existence stopped making sense a long time ago and who's just trapped in this horrifying Distortion of what their life should be and I think there's something very human about that when I think back to the very worst periods of my life what comes to me is this feeling of being trapped in my own mind that there is something in me that is distorting how I see the world and the people around me and everything and it's it's horrible it's a nightmare and I think the hardest part of it is the feeling that it's never going to end that the way you feel in those moments is how you will feel for the rest of your life and if you've ever struggled mentally or emotionally you know that fear and it is that fear that I've never seen visualized better than in [ __ ] Garfield fan art we all want to be Garfield but we all are John arle and the thing is those bad times they do Never Last they do end and I think that's why I find this final piece so hopeful the piece is done in Ram's traditional penting style but with a subtlety that makes it feel nearly carved from Stone and it shows a demonic Garfield lying defeated and broken a sandel foot pinning him to the ground which belongs to an Angelic John arle tears rolling down his face his wings raised in this just glorious Arc and it's like after everything we've watched John go through after all the loneliness the depression the complete loss of his identity leading to the disolution of his reality into this infinite object nightmare after all that somehow he's made it to this moment he's taken his life back from from the [ __ ] that haunts him and it's it's [ __ ] beautiful and maybe this won't last maybe there's still darker times ahead but it doesn't matter because In This Moment he's okay John's okay and look I get it I get that having this strong an emotional reaction to What is most certainly A Garfield [ __ ] post is ridiculous but godamn that is what I do here I take my hope where I can get it the title of this piece being the Forgiveness of John oh um I put the I put the costume back on because I was worried that this part might be too heavy without it and and also I I I paid a lot of money for it what makes the Forgiveness of John so powerful to me is that in isolation it is an amazing piece of art and a real technical achievement but when taken with everything else we've spoken about this video it becomes the concluding chapter of a gigantic meta narrative that is formed around John Arbuckle and again if I was the only person who saw that there wouldn't be a story here the Forgiveness of John being the third most popular post on r/ i'msorry John of all time as well as adorning its front page and I think it's awesome that so many people's individual Works come together to pull such an incredible story out of something as simple as a daily comic strip about a cat who likes lasagna this is what I love about fandoms when you stare at them for long enough these beautiful and strange stories start to emerge that are distorted and and honest and amazing and whatever else you want to say about the nightmare of the modern day internet and social media I'm glad that those stories have a place to exist I think that's pretty cool friends thank you for joining me today and I really hope you enjoyed this video I want to give a huge thank you to artist lumpy touch who did the incredible thumbnail for this video uh lumpy touch has so much awesome [ __ ] that I didn't even get to touch on this video so be sure to check out their YouTube channel and follow them at Lumpy touch on Twitter I also really want to thank both Quinton reviews and Izzy is both of whom laid some serious groundwork for this video as well as giving me some fantastic leads so thank you guys if you would like to help me make more videos like this head on over to patreon.com for/ Super iatch Wolf where for just a single dollar you can help me make more of what well whatever this was thank you this week to W da and I just want to immediately apologize for my pronunciation of that name cheli cyanide house austa Wickman bubbly chicaa Emanuel Paredes and Fang slime find me as ever hosting the let's fight a Boss video game podcast on Twitter at iatch Wolf or on twitch.tv/ superer iatch Wolf friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time