fucked up that they didn’t just keep making more of Garfield: His 9 Lives (1984)

I’m not talking about the animated special or the recent Boom! Studios revival. I’m talking the original experimental illustrated book thing. I just want to see more wildly different artists and writers write Garfield stories with the missive of “okay just go hog wild, make it weird”

Most info about it online today is about The One Fucked Up Story In It Where Garfield Cold Murders A Grandma

Plus “Babes & Bullets”, the noir pastiche that was basically Blacksad 1.0 and was popular enough to get its own spinoff animated special later. I remember the art for it looking spectacular— just realistic anthro cats in suits doing detective things, in moody greyscale. I wish I could find more images

Later adaptations were just “what if Garfield was a little detective cat!!” No. I want photorealistic cat people pulp mysteries. Maybe this is why I remember this even now despite having last read G:H9L when I was, like, six

Don’t talk to me about Blacksad. It could’ve been this and then it did a big What If Furries Were A Racism Allegory

There was also one called “The Garden” which is REALLY hard to find any scans of online, and that’s a fucking shame, because its eye-wateringly bright neo-psychedelia airbrush art carbon dates it to 1984. A Girl Media artifact lost to time

This is like. The only art of it I could find on GIS. Most other mentions of it are the animated special’s version of it, which, again, sucked a lot of the weirdness out of it

@irisjaycomics Oh yeah, I remember that book. I still think about parts of it, especially The Garden. I wish it had been much more of a thing, all those different stories were waaaaay more creative than anything else ever done with Garfield.