Garfield in Chains!

Now available at Quimby’s is Garfield in Chains, a first volume containing 38 strips (out of a countless and ever-growing number) spanning from two years ago until now. Wow! 38 strips! Full color cover! Garfield-book shaped!

Here’s a bit of backstory to it:

During the week of Halloween in 1989, Jim Davis’ popular comic strip Garfield underwent a dramatic change. The strip had long begun its descent into monotony and mediocrity, but this particular week gave the strip a surprising boost in interest. The art changed to a more dark and horror-like style, and the strip gained, for that week, a storyline. Garfield wakes up to find himself alone in the house. Upon further inspection, he finds out that the house is abandoned and no one has lived there for years. The strip gains a narrator, who tells us that Garfield is faced for the first time with his worst fear: being alone. Freaking out and running around the house, the narrator tells us that Garfield can fight back with the only weapon he has: denial. Screaming that he doesn’t want to be alone, Garfield is then back in his normal existence, in what seems like a happy ending.

There is a theory, however, that in fact Garfield did not escape his abandoned house, and that the rest of the strip to this day is a fantasy Garfield invents to keep himself happy as he slowly starves to death in his empty house.

For over two years, I have been using that week of Garfield strips as the basis of a mind-clearing exercise in my sketchbook. Whenever an idea doesn’t come, or I’m getting frustrated with my current situation, I draw a non-sequitur, stream-of-consciousness Garfield strip. Some of the time they end up pertaining to some obscure pop-culture reference that’s on my mind. Sometimes they betray more of my deeper emotions and insecurities, leading to a bizarre and surreal landscape for the ailing Garfield (now a mirror to myself) to inhabit. “Garfield in Chains,” as I’ve named my strips, is a reflection of my psyche, and as such, is very important to me, personally and professionally.

My impetus for undertaking this project is in part because it is something that I have always wanted to do, but is something that always is but on the back-burner in the face of schoolwork or other personal projects. Now is the perfect and possibly only time in the foreseeable future that I will have the opportunity to collect these works, which I feel have merit in their humor, their surrealism, and their sheer growing number.