There is no doubt in my mind that Jim Davis is a smart man. Jim Davis is.. Capable of.. Anything, to me. He is remarkable. But this is so far beyond that, I think we might see that this work of art is revered and respected in years to come. Jim Davis is possibly a new master of the craft, a genius of the eye, they very well may say the same things about Jim Davis in 500 years that we say about the great philosophical and artistic masters from centuries ago. Jim Davis is a modern day Socrates or da Vinci, mixing both striking visual beauty with classical, daring, unheard of intellect. Look, he combines these things to make profoundly simple expressions.This strip is his masterpiece, the pipe strip, is his masterpiece. And it is a masterpiece and a marvel. I often look at.. Garfield's.. Particular pose in this strip. He is poised and statuesque, and his cat stare is reminiscent of the fiery gazes often found in religious iconography. But still his eyes are playful, lying somewhere between the solemn father's expression in Rembrant's Return of the Prodigal Son, and the coy smirk of da Vinci's St. John the Baptist. His ears stick up, signifying a peak readiness. It's as if he could at any moment pounce. He is, after all, the close relative and descendant of the mighty jungle cats of Africa, that could leap after prey.. You can see the power drawn into Garfield's hind quarters, powerful haunches indeed. The third panel.. Now, just saying this now, this is just coming to me, now.. The third panel of the pipe strip is essentially a microcosm for the entire strip itself. All the power dynamics, the struggle for superiority, right?WHO has the pipe? WHERE is the pipe?All of that is drawn, built, layered into Garfield's iconic pose here. You can see it in the curl of his tail.. Garfield's ear whiskers stick up on-end, the smoke billows upwards, drawing the eye upward. The increasing scope, I'm just.. Amazed, really, that after 33 years of reading and brown townyzing the same comic strip, I'm able to find new dimensions, it's a testament to the work. For 6 years I delved into tobacco research, because.. Can a cat smoke? This is a metaphysical question, yes, can any cat smoke? Do we know? Can just Garfield smoke? The research says no, nicotine poisoning can kill animals, especially household pets. All it takes is the nicotine found in as little as a single cigarette. Surely Jon's pipe holds a substantial amount of tobacco. It is true that pets living in the homes of smokers are nearly 25% more likely to develop some form of cancer, most likely due to second-hand smoke. But these are facts of smoking and it's tolls on our world. But, after visiting two tobacco processing plants in Virginia, in the Phillip Morris cigarette manufacturing facility I came no closer to cracking the meaning. I was looking for any insight. A detective of a homicide case has to look at every angle, so I'm always taking apart the pipe strip. I have focused on every minute, every detail of this strip. Jon Arbuckle's clothing, I have replicas. I am an expert in textiles. See, the smoking thing was a hang-up for me, but it was the statement here, until..This is key, this is the breakthrough. The pipe is not a pipe, really. Obviously there is symbolism at work, here. I saw that from the beginning and I looked at the literal aspects of the strip to gain insight onto the metaphors at play. I worked at a newspaper printing press for 18 months in the late 1980s, I was learning the Literal to inform the Gestural, the.. Subliteral, the In Between. Jon reading the newspaper means so much more than just.. 'Jon reading a newspaper.' But how could you ever hope to decipher the puzzle without knowing everything there is to know about newspapers? Okay, for example, Jon holds his paper up with his left hand, thumb gripping the interior. I learned that this particular grip here is the newspaper grip of 19th century aristocrats, and this aristocrat grip was a point of contention that influenced the decision to move forward to prohibition, in the United States in the early 20th century. So Jon's hand position is much more than that, it is a comment on class war and the resulting reactionary culture, but I didn't know about the aristocratic newspaper grip until I came across some microfiche archives at the printing press. It's about information, you have to take it apart, and the breakthrough on the smoking cat came late. It was.. 8 years ago, actually."smoking cat" is an industry term, it's what the smoking industry calls a tattletale teenager who tells on his friends after they've all tried smoking for the first time, and it is actually a foreign translation, bastardization of the term "smoking rat". But the phrase was confused when secret documents went back and forth between China and America. These documents are still secret, and the only reason I know about the term is because I know a man, and my friend, let's call him Timothy. Yeah, yes, it's.. A fake name, for his own protection.Timothy worked for Phillip Morris for 16 years, and he had seen the documents, and then he told me.. It was an 'aha moment', and he said.. "But how? How could this cartoonist, Jim Davis, know about this obscure term from the mid-70s used exclusively by a few cigarette companies?" This is still a mystery to me, but I connected dots and noted.. Jim Davis' child experiences on a farm. He must've seen something.. What could it be? Timothy went on to tell me there was one particular "smoking cat", a boy, from.. Yes, Indiana. A boy named Ernie Barguckle, who became a thorn in the side of the tobacco companies for a couple years. He did more than tattle to his parents, he and his family took legal action, and they eventually received a huge settlement payout. But that name is too similar. "Ernie Barguckle", Jon Arbuckle. Jim Davis must've used this, but there's more here. Ernie Barguckle spent nearly half that settlement money on experimental medical procedures to cure his.. Impotence. He was impotent.So.. He was a smoking cat with a.. A metaphorical 'pipe' that did not work. But are you starting to see the layers here? This is exciting stuff, you start to get a whole picture here, and it informs the work, it.. It's just remarkable. Jim Davis took these raw ideas, these.. Pieces, and he transformed them into smart social commentary that is also ravishingly beautiful.I have cried. I have cried, I have cried, I've cried, CRIED over this piece. It just.. Gets into my soul.. I try to explain this to people, I have the newspaper articles about Ernie Barguckle. People have fought me on this. They don't see it, or they are close minded. "How can a comic strip about a cat smoking a pipe mean anything more than that?" But it is more. And when I feel spiritual, or start to think existentially, I still see this comic.
woke
what are you smoking?
what the forget
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw
