3170: Embryonic Garfield
| Embryonic Garfield |
 Made by: Muchacho1994 |
Explanation[edit | edit source]
This strip is a scan of an unedited scan of Garfield's predecessor strip, Jon, that helps demonstrate the character evolution between it and the early years of Garfield; the credited Garfield strip is a remake of the depicted Jon strip. At the time, images of Jon in the wild were so rare, it is widely believed the day this strip first ran on Square Root of Minus Garfield was the first time Jon ever resurfaced outside of unidentified mentions in Garfield retrospective material. It is likely that this strip ultimately led to not just the entire archive of Jon resurfacing, but quite possibly its own predecessor Gnorm Gnat as well.
This particular strip, the 1977-07-09 strip, had previously appeared in said Garfield retrospective material, in particular Garfield at 25: In Dog Years I'd Be Dead. It is unknown whether the Garfield strip this Jon strip was remade as was intended to be given an original strip credit from the beginning (it can be undoubtedly said the link within the main author's note was indeed intentional, as the author did intend to have the Jon and Garfield strips compared), or if it got one during a rework of the original strip crediting system Square Root of Minus Garfield uses to facilitate its original strip date search function; the fact that there is no duplicated original strip credit in brackets on this strip's Square Root of Minus Garfield page, much like the strips that ran on Square Root of Minus Garfield on the days before and after, may suggest that the original strip credit was indeed added later.
The author writes:[edit | edit source]
This is a very early strip, apparently drawn as a syndication submission circa 1976-1977, and later redrawn as the 1978-07-01 strip after Garfield started in 1978. Jon looks like Jon, for the most part. Garfield on the other hand... let's just say I'm glad Jim Davis didn't ultimately go with this design. He looks like a bald old man with whiskers!
I'm not quite sure how I found this, but I know it came from somewhere.
Original strip: 1978-07-01.
Transcript[edit | edit source]
Jon: This is it, Garfield. The late-late movie with Brigitte Bardot.
Jon: Got our soda pop. Got our popcorn. We're set.
Jon: ZZZZZZ
Garfield: ZZZZ
