1210: De-Fence
| De-Fence |
 Made by: Cody |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
This strip makes a correction to the original Garfield strip so that Garfield correctly states that he had been dancing on a waxed fence. At the time this strip was created, all online Garfield archives had a strip that misspelled the word "fence" as "fench"; it is also likely that this error made its way into a number of printings of Garfield Sits Around the House: His Seventh Book (both standalone and as part of Fat Cat Three Pack Volume 3) as well for reasons explained later.
Only in more recent years has it been made clear that "fench" was, in fact, an error; the now-defunct garfield.com strip archive carried its error version until so late in its life that most surviving garfield.com-related archives of this strip are of the error version, only putting out an official corrected version not too long before the site was taken down (the Garfield wiki on Fandom carries this rare corrected version here; the timing of the emergence of the official corrected version is what suggests the error did initially make it into Garfield Sits Around the House: His Seventh Book). The current main GoComics version and the secure-domain mirror of the smaller-sized former "images.ucomics.com" strips as seen here are still the error version to this day; GoComics did put out their own corrected version as part of their now-defunct Garfield Classics line (that version debuted on 2020-04-01), but was taken down from public view on 2023-12-01 as part of discontinuing the Garfield Classics line and can only be readily viewed as social-media copies (the actual GoComics Garfield Classics version presumably still exists buried in their archives as certain strips' Garfield Classics remasters still appear in Garfield-themed collected features, but as no page readily using it appears to have been preserved, it is not readily accessible).
This strip would go on to inspire a number of other Square Root of Minus Garfield theme based on words similar to "fench", and from there other things without relation to similar words, being waxed and then danced on by Garfield.
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
Original strip: 1982-03-27.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
{Garfield dances on the fence}
SFX: tappity tappity tappity
{Garfield slips and falls off the fence}
Garfield: Okay... who waxed the fence?
