NYT Essay On Reinvention of "Garfield" Strip

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/magazine/garfield-twitter.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 I remember when "Garfield" first began running in the local Knight-Ridder paper.  I got the volumes as they came out.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the quality of the strip slowly declined over time.  Jim Davis hired a bunch of writers to help him churn out ideas.  Then J.D. decided to author (With help, of course!) another strip, "U.S. Acres".  The comic strip "U.S. Acres" was a flop and it was exactly at the same time that J.D. pulled the plug on "U.S. Acres" that "Garfield"'s quality nose-dived.  It was almost as though the staff from "U.S. Acres" had been transferred to the "Garfield" team and had somehow contaminated the ideas process.  In my mind, nothing symbolized the cratering of the quality more than when the character "Lyman" was eliminated.  Lyman had been Jon's housemate and owned the dog Odie; and, as such, provided a more reliable quality of humor than any non-housemate character could.  Odie staying while Lyman got canned was a nadir that the strip never recovered from.

books I keep forgetting about

• The True Believer:  Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
• Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm
•  Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System
  by Alec Karakatsanis
• The Night Manager by "John Le Carre"
• Neko Gari Zoku no Osa (The Chief of the Cat-Hunting Tribe) by Jun Maeda