How important is the comic format for Garfield? Is that still integral to its life?
You’re talking about the 3-panel strip? Yeah. It is for my timing and style. To me, working on the animation stuff is much easier than the comic strip be- cause you can let Garfield run, he can try to stop, there’s music, sound effects, all kinds of things. But with the comic strip, there’s no audio, no animation, plus you have to freeze-frame the character in the perfect position with the perfect expression to get the idea across. You have about 25 words or less. You only have about 7 inches within which to work. You have to set up the plot, twist it, and resolve it in that space, so it’s very tough. I love the challenge of using the economy of not only words, but of line, to get the point across. If you ever read a comic strip to someone, you realize it’s not as funny when you say it out loud as it is when you say it to yourself, in your head. So I write it for performing in your head, plus I try to get to the punchline an instant before the reader does. That’s the trick. That invoke
