How I was cured of my Garfield attachment

In which the author reminisces on the past.

Back around... 2018-2019, in the good old pre-Covid times, when the world was a more-connected place, and people had not fully internalized how it easy it is to waste valuable work time on video calls...

I discovered Garfield.

Back then, it was still hosted on the "garfield.com" domain. Free to access, a rich collection of jokes and comic relief with philosophical undertones that could fit a lot of different situations. I don't remember if there were advertisements—adblock took care of that—but there was no paywall, and the website was made using simpler technologies, which let you access the image files directly, without the framing of the page, if you knew how.

Initially, I was skeptical. Garfield is a huge franchise, from what I know, with movies, and physical books. There's no way such freedom would last, right?

But then, I browsed some more, and I was hooked. I started reading it en-masse, perfecting my technique from other webcomics I had read before. I would jump to a random place, then go in a single direction until I ran into a comic I've seen before. Every day held new comics, and it was great. When those became rarer, I started re-reading favorites.

The best part came, when I started sharing with friends. Sometimes they laughed too; sometimes they were annoyed at how persistent I was with that Garfield craze. Sometimes, a particular comic was just the perfect response to a conversation—that was the best. That's when I discovered kind people on the internet had even made Garfield search engines, like lasagna.cz! By remembering a few key words, I could find the exact comic I got reminded of—amazing!

I imagine that if I still in such infatuation with Garfield comics today, I would have slowly filled a room with related merch. But alas, God had mercy 😅

In 2019, the first signs of trouble showed up. Viacom Inc. bought up the rights to Garfield, and showed their intentions to turn less loss and more profits out of it, by shuttering down the old site and moving all the strips to GoComics, where they still live.

GoComics still allowed full, free access at the time, so what's the big deal? Well, for one, the GoComics site was less technical-user-friendly--images were available only under undecipherable links, with low resolutions. And, I had read enough internet horror stories to know that once copyright holders start adding technical measures that limit access, it's just a matter of time before they limit access entirely...

But welp, I was already into the whole thing, so I kept going, browsing and sharing comics with friends.

I went even deeper, in fact. At some point, I ran out of new comics to read and accumulated a bookmark queue of good ones to share. But just as I thought there wasn't much left, came around Square Root of Minus Garfield—a community collection of memes and remixes of Garfield strips, released daily. I read it in much the same way as Garfield before—I consumed it, bite by bite, in its entirety. These weren't as sharable, and sometimes not even as funny, but—now I had two or more jokes to associate with each Garfield comic, and that also felt nice.

Then, of course, (who would have thought!) GoComics revealed, out of the blue, "a new redesign of our website". A bit after, in 2025, GoComics announced the we should worry not—all archives would be available to Subscribers!

A bit after, and archives were no longer accessible for free. The whole collection, behind a paywall.

There would be no more sharing of comics with friends. There would fewer and fewer more kind Internet strangers indexing the comic contents. There would be a cost to remember, year after year, to having an access to comics I liked. (There was already a slow decline in joke quality, mind it, so I was not particularly interested in access to new comics.)

I thought, "naa, no way", and left. For good.

Stylized image of a striped orange cat, tiled on a blue background. Excuse the programmer art: the artist was sleepy, and it was late.

Today, just a scant two years later, I've forgotten most of the Garfield comics I prided myself for remembering.

Doing the math, if I wanted a lifetime access to Garfield comics, that would cost me about €800 if I bought all the collections, or... about €1700 total if I signed up for GoComics for the next 50 years. But, the books can be shared or resold; the subscription would be individual, and would be gone the moment I stop paying. And the price of the subscription can go up faster than the price of books.

So, I am happy with my decision.

My takeaway from the whole experience is that... cultural artifacts grow fastest and have the most impact, when they can be shared freely. (Yeah, I arrived right where I started, right at open-source. 😂) I've paid for paywalls before, and that really is the saddest part of them—that once you find something valuable on the other side, it's hard to bring it back with you.

I'd imagine others would think that comic-readers (like me) who won't pay don't care about comics anyway--revealed choices and all that. However, that presumes people that read comics are egoists that only want to pay for their own use. Even at high-end restaurants it doesn't work like that, as people might opt to cover for a whole table and not just for themselves. And even the restaurant analogy falls short, as cultural works are a lot more like a sunny day you invite others to partake in, than they are like a buffet that slowly runs out of food.

So.. if revealed choices are important, here is a choice I can reveal: I'd much rather talk about and support freely-sharable comics, than pay-walled comics. Business owners may reveal their choices at will. (:

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