5130: G-a-r-f-i-e-l-d through the decades

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G-a-r-f-i-e-l-d through the decades

Made by: Sloublues

Explanation

This comic is unexplained. If you can edit this page to provide an explanation, please do!

The author writes:

Following the evolution of Jim Davis's lettering over the years, as displayed in the name of his star feline. The specific dates chosen each year have no meaning (though obviously I picked the first strip ever), I just picked at quasi-random using the search engine at lasagna.cz to find strips where someone said Garfield's name. I avoided Sundays in case there were scaling inconsistencies. I also avoided yelling and other textual effects.

I certainly expected the early lettering to vary within each year, but the '80s surprised me with just how inconsistent the line thickness was. The text seems to be hand-lettered through 2008 at a minimum. You can see variation in 2013 and 2018 if you focus on e.g. the Rs and Ls, but I couldn't say how much of that might be down to antialiasing etc.

Next time you're adding or moving around text in a submission and you feel self-conscious about how fake it looks, look at 1988-07-27.

Original strips: 1978-06-19, 1978-10-04, 1978-12-27, 1983-01-04, 1983-06-15, 1983-08-04, 1988-04-18, 1988-07-27, 1988-11-03, 1993-02-06, 1993-08-24, 1993-11-10, 1998-03-21, 1998-05-27, 1998-09-23, 2003-04-25, 2003-08-13, 2003-11-10, 2008-02-01, 2008-06-17, 2008-11-24, 2013-03-08, 2013-07-02, 2013-10-04, 2018-02-21, 2018-06-15, 2018-11-24.

Transcript

{The word "Garfield" copied three times from each of the years 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2018}