Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
It is Garfield in three words: a cat whose only ambition is to be left alone, and who has found the one day of the week that always makes it worse. Anyone dreading the alarm on a Monday morning can borrow it. The joke is that a cat has no job to go to, so the grudge is pure solidarity with the rest of us, and the strip has kept making it for decades.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for GarfieldShow the scene
Garfield began in newspapers on 19 June 1978, in 41 US papers. The hatred of Mondays starts a few months later, in the strip of 18 September 1978, where Garfield bats at the curtains, gets tangled up in them and, for the first time, says he hates Mondays. Over the next weeks the gag returns: Jon makes his bed with Garfield inside, and Garfield gets mowed after leaping out of a window. Fans' wiki treats Monday as the strip's recurring villain, an off-panel force that rains pianos and pies on him.
Sources (2)
- Garfield Wiki: MondayComic Strips, Bad Luck, 1978 to 1989 listReference checked
- Wikipedia: GarfieldSyndication and Recurring subjects and themesReference checked
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