Garfield
Garfield
I want to see something unexpected in comics. Just one strip could make up for it all. [Garfield is standing on hind legs facing and looking directly at the camera. But is off-center in the frame, about 1/3 from the left, rotated very slightly clockwise.] [Zoom in on Garfield, still to the left, now rotated slightly counterclockwise.] [Zoom in again on Garfield, now the frame clips off the left side of his face.] Garfield thought bubble: The world is burning. [Final zoom in, the frame is ripped like a page, offset, and Garfield's eyes are half closed on the right half.] Garfield thought bubble: Run. Jim Davis, throw off your commercial shackles. Challenge us. Go out in a blaze of Dadaist glory. There is still time.

The newspaper comic strip Garfield , which features an orange cat as the main character, has increasingly been known for repetitive, quality-lacking strips. In the past, this was because the creator, Jim Davis , prefers to explore the same subjects he is comfortable with but in different ways — or from a less charitable view, because the strip is intended for a wide audience and thus becomes homogenized and inoffensive by nature. This attitude has only become more pronounced in the 21st century, as the aging Davis becomes less and less interested in the franchise. Regardless of the reason, these strips are now ghost written with little input from Davis and rarely explore the unconventional. The comic is challenging Davis to do something unexpected and surprise us all. The comic also accuses Davis of being a "sell out", sticking to bourgeois/commercial logic, something that dadaist artists challenged.
Dadaism was an artistic movement in the early 20th century marked primarily by chaos, irrationality, and surrealism. Some of the artists believed that the bourgeois logic made human beings unhappy and therefore led to war.
Randall leads by example by featuring a strip that parodies the style of Garfield, with multiple colors (xkcd usually contains only black and white, with some few containing an additional color like red or yellow) and a character that is not a stick figure breaking the normal xkcd pattern. Another dadaist aspect is the fact that while Garfield is smiling, he is communicating something that could be considered terrifying.
The title text explains that xkcd is exercising legal use of Davis's intellectual property, namely the title character of his comic. The Supreme Court case mentioned, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music , confirmed that parody is legal even when there is commercial gain as a result, and also referenced the Copyright Act of 1976 , 17 U.S.C. § 107, for the same reason.
While this is normally understood by most anyone who questions such matters, Randall includes it as a reference to the lessening of strict copyright law, which many comics also mention, usually in the context of open-source software and those who promote it, like at the comics featuring Richard Stallman .
I want to see something unexpected in comics. Just one strip could make up for it all. [Garfield is standing on hind legs facing and looking directly at the camera. But is off-center in the frame, about 1/3 from the left, rotated very slightly clockwise.] [Zoom in on Garfield, still to the left, now rotated slightly counterclockwise.] [Zoom in again on Garfield, now the frame clips off the left side of his face.] Garfield thought bubble: The world is burning. [Final zoom in, the frame is ripped like a page, offset, and Garfield's eyes are half closed on the right half.] Garfield thought bubble: Run. Jim Davis, throw off your commercial shackles. Challenge us. Go out in a blaze of Dadaist glory. There is still time.
