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Garfield: Accidentally Relevant

This was today’s Garfield strip:

Jim Davis took to Facebook to claim that he did this strip without checking to see when it would be run, and that it’s purely a terrible coincidence that it ran on November 11. Whether you believe this (don’t comic strip artists normally create their strips with some indication of when they’ll run, just so they’ll get the Christmas strips on the right day?), it’s certainly livened up the reading of Garfield like nothing else since the creation of Garfield Minus Garfield.

I have to say, if it had been an intentional 11-11 strip, I would have considered it tasteless, but I wouldn’t necessarily have seen it as an insult to soldiers or to the day — it would have been more of an argument against glorifying war. Sort of like the classic Paddy Chayefsky movie The Americanization of Emily, where James Garner argues not that wars shouldn’t be fought, but that we shouldn’t talk about violent death as if it’s something to be celebrated. And that view is not entirely at odds with the purpose of Remembrance Day, which is a day of mourning as much as anything. But I guess that would have been too contentious a point for Garfield to make on purpose.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIeYppX-lRg

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