Skinning The Cat

The LA Times has gained national attention by dropping "Garfield" from its comics page.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000746277

Can I get a round of "Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead?" I mean, seriously, this strip hasn't been funny for fifteen years. Davis lost the feeling, and it showed. The suction-cupped toy of greed was smacked onto the rear windshield of his artistic credibility. The result was a strip more painful to read than the metaphor in the previous sentence.

Now, I'm not against licensing your strip; plenty of cartoonists have done it and been able to keep their cred. And "Garfield and Friends" remains one of my favorite animated shows of all time. But when you water down the strip to make it more commercially viable, when you hand over the reins of daily creation to unnamed assistants, when you cease to become an artist and are instead a CEO, you lose my respect. You become a tool of the acolytes of capitalism gone wild, another herd animal chewing your cud and mooing out that long-disproven mantra of the eighties, "Greed is gooooooooooood, greed is gooooooooood."

So good for the LA Times, and fie on the corporate Cthulu that was once Jim Davis. It's high time the strips had a round of cullings.

You're next, Blondie.