4358: BREAKING NEWS: VIACOM FLUSHES WEBSITE LEGACY DOWN THE DRAIN

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BREAKING NEWS: VIACOM FLUSHES WEBSITE LEGACY DOWN THE DRAIN
4358.png
Made by: JakeLeB


Explanation[edit | edit source]

This strip takes a jab at Viacom's takedown of the garfield.com website, and with it its high-quality Garfield and U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm strip archive, on what the Garfield franchise essentially treated as Garfield's 42nd birthday; this strip also took a jab at the strip that ran that day.

The author's notes appear to imply that Nickelodeon is the larger entity that owns the Viacom company; it is, in fact, the other way around--Viacom being the major conglomerate that owns Nickelodeon. While most of the garfield.com U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm archive was indeed colored, most garfield.com-related archives of that strip have 1989-02-01 onward in black and white, even the Sunday strips, implying those strips were never officially colored by official means (this trait partially inspired iToons #711: "Orson's Farm Abridged (Final Episode)"); the Garfield wiki on Fandom does show some of that later part of U.S. Acres in color (starting from February 1989 here), but those color strips do not appear to be garfield.com copies, appearing to be closer to GoComics size (potentially taken from GoComics back when they still offered U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm, or from an archive related to that repository--and even that does not explain the Fandom Garfield wiki's colorized copy of the finale, as GoComics never ran the final three Sunday strips during their entire time offering U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm and the garfield.com archive never appeared to color those final three strips).

This strip's title indicated this strip was made and submitted around the time the garfield.com website was taken down, but naturally ran months later due to the nature of Square Root of Minus Garfield's strip queue.

The author writes:[edit | edit source]

On June 19th of 2020, Garfield.com was shut down. Not only was it a source of HD Garfield comics, but it was the last place(?) to see HD, colored versions of the U.S. Acres comics as well. Nickelodeon, more specifically Viacom, threw all of that away in order to get more people to go to their stupid site. Thanks for the birthday gift....jerks.

Original strip: 2019-06-16.

Transcript[edit | edit source]

{It's June 19th, 2020. Garfield, having turned 42, decides to check his website in order to see his new strip. Spoiler alert, Garfield, it's terrible. Anyways...}
SFX: Tick
{Instead of seeing his homepage, he sees a message on the screen}
Message: Garfield is now a part of the Nickelodeon Family! You will be redirected to his new home on Nick.com in: 14
{Garfield is very disgusted by this. 42 years of strips, HD ones mind you, gone. He throws his phone and walks away, glancing at the 4th wall in an annoyed way}
Garfield: Thanks, Nick
{I'm not mad, I'M FURIOUS}