Bad cat, no lasagna

It seems that the Los Angeles Times has dropped Garfield from their comics page.

Gene Weingarten, a humor columnist for The Washington Post and Washington Post Writers Group, praised the Times decision during his weekly washingtonpost.com chat yesterday. He said the paper displayed "the kind of cojones missing in too many places" and described "Garfield" as "a strip produced by a committee, devoid of originality, devoid of guts, a strip cynically DESIGNED to be inoffensive and bad, on the theory that public tastes are insipid. Now we need others to follow suit. Like the Post."

Emphasis mine, for reasons my longtime readers will understand.

And Mike "Tycho" Krahulik of the online comic Penny Arcade is overjoyed.

It was a montage of scenes just like the end of the new Return of the Jedi. All the races of the galaxy celebrated in culturally appropriate ways when they heard that Garfield had been pulled from the LA Times. It's hard not to get caught up in the energy of the moment, but it's more than likely just comics page deck-shuffling, so "the revolution" is probably not coming anytime soon. This leaves me with bushels of unfulfilled fantasies. Huge orange cat statues hauled off their pedestals by tanks. Every Jim Davis in every wrinkle of every dimension dragged gasping to the bottom of the ocean.

I don't know where the stricture against upstart webcomics saying bad things about our print forebears originated, but no-one ever consulted me and I never ratified that document.

Being unaffiliated, I can cackle guilt-free. Bwahahahaha!