Garfield is lazy; Garfield is a cat; Garfield likes lasagna.
Is there really much more to say about Garfield? The characteris not complicated. Since the comic debuted in 1978, Garfields core qualities have shifted less than the mostly immobile cat himself.
But this is 2017 a timeof Internet wars, social conundrums and claims to competingevidence about Garfields gender identity.
Wikipedia had to put Garfields page on lockdown last week after a 60-hour editing war in which the characterslisted gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like acartoon version of Schrdingers cat: male one minute; not the next.
He may have been a boy in 1981, but hes not now, one editor argued.
The debate has spilled into the broader Internet, where a Heat Street writer complained ofcultural marxists bent on turning one of pop cultures most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination.
[Students were told to select gender pronouns. One chose His Majesty to protest absurdity.]
It all started with a comment Garfields creator, Jim Davis, made two years ago in an interview with Mental Floss titledinnocuously: 20 Things You Might Not Know About Garfield.
Between the sitesplugs for Garfield DVDs, Davis revealed a few harmless curiosities about the cat: Garfield is named Gustav in Sweden. Garfield and his owner Jon Arbuckle live in Muncie, Ind.
Garfield is very universal, Davis told Mental Floss mid-interview. By virtue of being a cat, really, hes not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old.
The remark caused no fuss. At first.
Until last week, when the satirist Virgil Texas dug the quote upand used it to make abold claim and bold move:
A brief note about Virgil Texas: Hes been known totroll before. The writeronce co-created a fictional pundit named Carl The Dig Diggler to parodythe media and annoy Nate Silver.
But Texas told The Washington Post he was only concerned about Garfield canon, in this case.
Texassaid he came across Daviss old quote while watching a five-hour, live-action, dark interpretation of Garfield (yes, really). Soheinvented aWikipedia editor (anyone can do it) named David The Milk Milkberg last week, and changed Garfields gender from male to none.
Almost instantly, the universe of Garfield fans clawed in.
AWikipediaeditor reverted Garfields gender back to male less than an hour after Texass change.
One minute later, someone in the Philippines made Garfield genderless again.
[Transgender boys mom sues hospital, saying he went into spiral after staff called him a girl]
And so on.Behind the scenes, Wikipedia users debatedhow toresolve the ragingedit war.
Every character (including Garfield himself!) constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns, oneeditor wrote listing nearly three dozencomic strips across nearly four decades toprove the point:
The one where Jon tells Garfield good boy! before Garfield shoves a newspaper into his owners mouth.
The one where the catsmagical talking bathroom scale (probably a proxy for Garfield himself) refers to Garfield as a young man and a boy.
But another editor argued that only one of thoseexamples looks at self-identification a 1981 strip in which Garfieldthinks, Im a bad boy after eating a fern.
And Milkberg/Texas stuck to his claims: If one could locate another source where Jim Davis states that Garfields gender is male or female, then this would give rise to a serious controversy in Garfield canon, he wrote on the Wikipedia debatepage. Yet no such source has been identified, and I highly doubt one will ever emerge.
Threads of competing evidence spiraled through Twitter, where one commenter compared the Garfield dispute to Krazy Kat: asexually ambiguous cartoon predecessor,profiled last month by theNew Yorker.
Some huntedbeyond the comic sectionin search ofanswers,intothe ambiguous world ofGarfield-themed merchandise and quasi-canonical arguments.
And some took the whole thing as ajoke.
But others chided orphilosophized: Why must we care what Garfield is or isnt? Jimmy King asked. Who cares what someone else perceives as him being male or female?
Many pondered the meaning of Daviss words in 2014, which were confusing because thecreatorreferred toGarfield as he whilesuggestingthe cat was neither he nor she.
AWikipedia user proposed a compromise to provide both genders, each appropriately referenced: Male[1] and/or none[2]. That didnt get much traction.
Garfields gender swapped20 times over 2 days (during which his religion was briefly listed as Shiite Muslim for some reason) before an administrator was forced to step in.
Garfield was finally,officiallylisted asmale on Wikipedia citing four comic strips including one from 1979 in which a veterinariansays hes too fat.
Andthe page waslocked against more edits until March.
Yet a Heat Street writer draggedthe argument to the very end of February citing the spinoff character Garzookas hard pecs and prominent bulge as evidence ofa rugged, heterosexual American MAN.
That didntresolve anything, of course.
Maybe this will:
Garfield is male, Davis told The Washington Post on Tuesday.He has a girlfriend, Arlene.
Presented withnew evidence, the satiristdeferred to the creator. Hes in charge of the canon, Texas said. Im just curious how it squares with his prior statement
If I had the opportunity I would interrogate him.
ButWikipedia hasalready progressedbeyond gender disputes. Now other aspects of the fat, lazy cat are beingcalled into question.
Forget about his gender and alleged Muslim faith, a user wrote Monday. Need we really list Arlene under the spouse category?
More reading:
This is what happens when two Internet nerds battle over politics
With his first-ever Garfield musical, creator Jim Davis revels in a dream fulfilled
From our 1982 archives: The Cat That Rots the Intellect
The rest is here:
Garfield's a boy right? How a cartoon cat's gender identity launched a Wikipedia war. - Washington Post