As a child and as an adult, Garfield epitomizes the strangely seductive allure of the monumentally commercially successful, banal and sub-mediocre. It’s the mainstream in Monday-hating, lasagna-craving feline form, a soulless machine that generates incredible profits for its creator and his syndicate and any number of doll, tee-shirt and bumper sticker manufacturers while lazily recycling the same handful of tropes, tropes that were, to be brutally honest, never actually funny.

The art and entertainment that I gravitated towards as a child and angry, alienated young man tended to be political and angry, deeply personal and darkly funny, satirical and cultishly adored rather than super popular. Garfield was the antithesis of all of that. It’s wildly impersonal. You learn next to nothing about Jim Davis from it. It’s apolitical and apathetic, formulaic and devoid of surprises.

It’s tacky and vulgar and goyish and deeply, deeply American in ways I find fascinating so when I saw that the first two years of the American institution’s now forty-year run were being released in book form as Volume 1: Garfield Complete Works: 1978 &1979 I knew I had to read it and write about it even if the highbrow naming of the elegantly presented volume meant that Davis was cruelly robbing the world of the obesity and over-eating wordplay found in such classic Garfield tomes Garfield at Large, Garfield Gains Weight, Bigger Than Life (a stark and haunting adaptation of the Nicholas Ray film starring James Mason with Garfield becoming cruel and violently arrogant towards with his family after he starts taking new medication), Bigger and Better, Tons of Fun, Weighs In, Takes the Cake and Eats Heart Out.