Webcomic / Square Root of Minus Garfield

The many forms of Garfield, including the square root of his inverse.

Square Root of Minus Garfield is a subset of the webcomic mezzacotta. Essentially, it's Garfield Minus Garfield turned up to eleven: a collection of humorous Garfield edits made by viewers. These edits often change the dialogue, or combine artwork from multiple Garfield strips. Some of the contributors read TV Tropes and use the tropes in their strips.

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Tropes:

Tropes A-F

• Absurdly Bright Light: Jon's smile in Zadie Smithfield, complete with a Shout-Out to White Teeth.
• Actor Allusion:invoked Voice Actors Garfield replaces the names of the characters with the first names of their respective voice actors for Garfield and Friends and the Garfield specials.
• all lowercase letters: Garfield in Lowercase, barring the title.
• Ambiguous Syntax: Garfield plus Labour Retention exploits and discusses this by using the original strip's ambiguous text to make a joke.
  unstattedCommoner: Having submitted an earlier modification of this strip, it then occured [sic] to me that "ways to keep the house cleaner" is ambiguous.
  
  Thus here Jon and Garfield are discussing ways in which they might retain the services of the cleaning lady.
• And Call Him "George": Parodied in Of Mice and Garfield when Garfield squeezes his pet chicken to death. It was only a rubber chicken.
• Animals See in Monochrome: Discussed but ultimately Averted by the author of this strip, which recolors this Garfield strip◊ as a dog would realistically see it. The author adds as a bonus the greyscale image that most people would expect from this trope.
• Anti-Humor:
  • Keep Off the Grass has Garfield come across a Keep Off the Grass sign, to which he just turns around and walks away. (Compare to the original where he decides to walk above the grass.)
  • Garfield Plus Willpower. The original comic rode on Garfield wanting to save a cookie, which he managed to do for about 5 seconds. In this comic, Garfield doesn't eat it at all.
  • Invisible Jon. Garfield is no longer joking, because Jon really is invisible.
  • Garfield Minus Humour. This edit is identical to the original Garfield strip, because the original had no humour.
  • Choose Your Own Garfield Book 3: The Anti-Humour Equation!, as the title implies, has multiple Anti-Humorous punchlines to the same strip.
• April Fools' Day: The April 1, 2016 strip features several strips (badly) edited to contain blatant Undertale references.
• Armless Biped: Garfield-Star Runner, the author lampshades this trope while talking about Homestar Runner.
• Art Evolution:
  • The art evolution of the Garfield strip is lampooned in Constantly Changing and Constantly Changing V2.0, wherein the first two panels use the 1978 and 1979 designs, and the last one is the 2000s design.
  • Jon's Evolution in Reverse (including Garfield) sees Jon's design regress from how he is currently drawn to his original character model, with each panel approximately sized to compare the size of his eyes.
• The Artifact: The "Special Strips" page was originally meant to be a page for "strips that are too short-term topical or otherwise unsuitable to be queued in the standard strip archive.". However, only two strips, both about the 2010 FIFA World Cup, were on there for many years, with most strips that fit this definition being published exclusively on the forum. The only time anyone ever thought about it again was the author's notes of this strip (which was made by one of the page's only two contributors, no less), as a pun because the strip was a Shout-Out to The Specials.
  • It was also bought up one other time when No. 1942 was submitted. David questioned the author on whether it should be added to the specials page (since it was done In Memoriam to Robin Williams) or to standard strip archive.
  • Eventually, a few more strips were added to the page. One was a strip based on Summer Games Done Quick 2017 (inspired by the Super Metroid Low% race, in which 2 of the 3 racers got wiped out by Phantoon and the last one continued on his own). Others were based on the 2019 Super Bowl and the purchase of the Garfield IP by Viacom.
• Art Shift:
  • Draw Me was drawn by hand on a piece of paper and scanned digitally.
  • Clip Artfield replaces Garfield, Jon, and Garfield's dish with stock clip art.
  • A different artist invades is drawn in a more simplistic style with a lack of outlines.
  • Atarifield takes a video game-themed comic and makes it into Atari-style pixel art.
  • "GarfieldWare: D.I.Y." was drawn using the comic maker in WarioWare: D.I.Y..
• Ascended Meme: Dan Walsh, creator of Garfield Minus Garfield, submitted the strip Jon Plus Cohen. Also counts as a Throw the Dog a Bone, because Jon is no longer lonely, as he had been in Garfield Minus Garfield.
• Aside Glance: The verbatim title of this strip, which removes a thought bubble from Jon in the last panel.
• Author Avatar: Jon As _________ replaces Jon with the submitter's persona.
• Bait-and-Switch: The description for "Without Me" implies that the author listened to the titular song by Eminem to get the idea for the strip... only to link to a cover done by Henry the Green Engine.
• Beat Panel:
  • There's one in Garfield Plus Penultimate Beat Panel. This strip now has four panels instead of three. The author's note links to TV Tropes.
  • There are 27 beat panels in We Got the Beat(s).
  • Then there's Garfield Plus Beats in the Beat Panel, where a video game-related strip is edited to put three different Beats in the beat panel.
  • This comic has twenty-two beat panels.
  • The aptly-titled 34 Beat Panels.
  • We are up to 37 beat panels in this comic while taking a shot at what seems to be a recurring problem with the source material lately.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Pie Form Coming Right Up has Garfield state he prefers "surprise" apples in pie form. He takes it back when he sees a giant apple pie flying toward his face.
  • Tener Cuidado Con Lo Que Deseas^note "Be Careful What You Wish For" in Spanish was done in response to Duplifield^note specifically, that strip's author's desire to create a lazy edit meme.
    Jon: (without changing expression) You know what the world needs more of? Lazy edits. Oops.
• Beige Prose:
  • April of No Sundays Collection, Random No Sundays, Seven More No Sundays, April of No Sundays: 2006, and May of No Sundays 2013 condense several 7-panel Sunday strips into 3-panel weekday strips while preserving the original gags.
  • Less Humor, More Story! condensed 15 panels into 10, removing some gags but preserving the story.
    • This follow-up does it the other way around, leaving just the gags.
• Black Comedy: In Odie's Secret to Happiness, the secret is a guillotine.
  Garfield: You may prefer to remain unhappy
• Blah, Blah, Blah: Exaggerated on Blah, where the entire text, even the title, copyright date, and signature of the comic are turned into the word.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: Parodied in strips with an intentionally bad translation from English to English.
  • Garfield Happily Lost in Translation (Japanese): "Did you say happy or stupid?" became "You say or, happy hippopotamus kana?"
  • Badly Translated Garfield: "I wonder if there's a place to go buy a life" became "If you know you live forever to get".
  • Babelfishfield. Jon's dialogue was translated from English to Spanish and back again.
  • Trilingual Garfield has the original comic translated from Chinese, Hebrew, and Italian.
  • Galfierd is meant to resemble a badly-translated game script. Garfield and Jon are NES-style sprites, and the dialogue is translated from Japanese.
  • Grafiedl was translated from Japanese to Chinese to English.
  • 加菲猫平衡 is two collections of mistranslated Garfield comics.
    Garfield: [horrified expression] We chookies!
  • Badly Translated Garfield 2: The Crocodiling: "Krock!", a sound effect for Garfield hitting Jon's hand, becomes "Crocodile!"
  • There must be a higher Category Bo Mot ja palauttaa uses 12 levels of Google Translation.
    Garfield: [playing a game of poker with mice] Finally, the sauce yourself.
  • John, Who Died uses 20 levels of Google Translation.
  • Hanging Lamp Shade is a meta take on this, with the dialogue put over the Pudding Pops comic.
  • A Point For A Big Guy was Google Translated a few times.
  • Googlefield Part 1 was inspired by Trilingual Garfield. The author's note says that machine translation has probably gotten too good to make much of a difference for such short and simple texts as Garfield comics.
• Blue Liquid Absorbent: Lampshaded in "Blue Monday". Garfield chases a fly and jumps into a toilet, with a blue "SPLOOSH" panel before it. In the original comic, the panel is yellow. The author notes that Garfield landing in an unflushed toilet is more disgusting than the ambiguous original comic, which would have been black-and-white when it was first printed, and colored blue "in accordance with TV adverts where any bodily fluid is always represented by blue liquid".
• Bolivian Army Ending: "How Will You Be Able To Tell?", which concerns Jon going insane after a fly goes up his nose, sees him murder the mailman, prompting a swarm of armed police to surround the house. The strip ends with him charging out the front door in a blaze of glory. "Hard cut to black. It can be inferred what happens next."
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Garfield Meets Zeus changed a sign from "Beware of Dog" to "Beware of God". Then the god zapped Garfield.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: #1452 "Names".
  Jon: [reading from book] Jon Arbuckle: idiot, moron, idiotic moron[...]
• Brick Joke:
  • The apteryx from 2010-01-22 reappears in 2011-10-07.
  • Parodied in Brickfield, when Garfield kicks Odie into 1984 from 1983.
  • Both parodied and played straight in Brickfield 2 from 2012-04-29. Brickfield 2 edits Garfield 1978-06-19 to reference SRoMG 2008-11-05; these are the very first strips of Garfield and Square Root of Minus Garfield.
  • In Garfield Skynet Garfield: Judgement Day, published 2011-02-03, The Terminator says that the "Garfield [something that sounds like "minus"] Garfield" meme will become self-aware "three years from now, on August 29th". 2014-08-29 rolled around, and this happened.
  • A completely coincidental one, pointed in the editor's note, is formed with Spritefield and Garfield Entertainment System. Both comics were drawn in pixel art and published four days apart from each other, but created by different people. In the former, Garfield goes to look for a present that Jon has hidden; in the latter, he surprises Jon by beating a video game, which was apparently his present.
  • "No. 4658: Really..." is a "Snails are Slow" edit where the snail says nothing throughout the entire strip, with a large ellipsis next to the comic, and the annotation appears to trail off. Three days later...
  • "The Pass" sees Garfield circumvent Jon's attempt at getting him to eat a carrot by merely making the carrot vanish. "Show Don't Tell", uploaded exactly one year later, sees the carrot suddenly appear next to Jon.
    Jon: Oh, Garfield, may I have a word with you?
    Garfield: (offscreen) Nope. A magician never reveals his secrets...
• Butterfly of Doom: "Dismal February" is the February 11th, 1989 strip^note where Garfield attempts suicide with the recliner but with Garfield managing to go through with it.
  In February of 1989, Garfield attempted suicide. Fortunately Jon was there to stop him. But what if Jon had been one panel too late?
  • "For Want of a Grip" starts with a 1978 strip^note Garfield trying to reach out for a ham, but has Garfield fall to the floor instead of grabbing the ledge; Word of God is that he died as a result. It then goes to 1991, with Garfield fading from existence, much to his shock.
• Call-Back:
  • Memorable Record edits a strip with a bland age joke into a call back to a strip featuring a skipping record.
  • Followup is one to Garfield Plus Cleaning Supplies.
  • Meta Commentary framed a comic edit of Garfield demonstrating his "time machine" as Jon creating a SRoMG strip and realizing it was terrible, reflecting the author's opinion of the base edit at the time. Over six years later, the comic is republished without the Framing Device as Death of the Author, as the author's view of the edit had changed in the intervening years.
• Call-Forward: A panel from Grafield & Maynard appeared in the earlier strip, Spot the Difference.
• Cartoon Bomb:
  • Blows up a pool in "Garfield Shrink & Re-enlarge, Part 4".
  • Appears in the aptly titled "A Bomb".
  • Blows up Garfield in "Jumpy Cat".
  • Explodes in his bed just as he gets back to it in "16th Birthday Special: Surprise Package".
  • While Garfield is taking a selfie, a spider plants one on Garfield's thumb, thus "photobombing" in two senses, in "Mad Photobomber".
  • Garfield shares an idea for some wintertime fun.
  • You just never know where Garfield will strike next
• Censor Decoy: How Arugulafield got past the self-imposed radar, according to the annotation. The author had also submitted an even more outrageous◊ comic, so the former was published and the latter was a forum exclusive.
• Censored for Comedy:
  • Censored Garfield
    Jon: Belinda Gilzone... I had a mad crush on her.
    Jon: She was head cheerleader.
    Jon: Ever had an entire pompon shoved up your nose?
    Garfield: Let me think .....no.
  • CENSORED. Garfield gets stuck in the pet door, and Odie tries to free him. The second to last panel shows Odie charging at Garfield’s rear at full speed, and the last panel is censored, suggesting an Ass Shove for poor Garfield. The last panel originally showed that all Odie accomplished was tearing the door off of the house.
  Author's note: It’s amazing what can be done simply by blacking out one panel and marking it “CENSORED”.
• Character Name and the Noun Phrase:
  • Invisifield and the Pudding Cup
  • Darkfield: Odie and the Murder
  • Garfield and the Oobleck
  • Garfield and the Cursed Mirror
  • Indiana Mouse and the Repast Crusade
  • Gartholemew and the Arbleckle
• Christmas Episode: Four so far:
  • 2010: It's the Thought That Counts, which takes the infamous "Googly-eyed Garfield" edit and makes it so Garfield has a present for the head and makes Jon the same, instead of them having googly eyes.
  • 2011: Christmasfield which pasted one panel from every December 25th at the time together.
  • 2016: Wishmas, which looks at the "What do you want for Christmas?" question.
  • 2017: White winter hymnal shows what happens when Jon goes caroling.
• Clumsy Copyright Censorship: Parodied by Garfield Minus Garfield Plus Good Reasons. In the second panel, Jim Davis orders SRoMG to stop using the Garfield characters. The third panel has no characters.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: This strip transplants the "Gazorpazorpfield" skit from Rick and Morty into a regular Garfield strip. Due to the SROMG guidelines, however, it had to be censored, turning it into this. The author created an uncensored version, however.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The track list in MOUSECROSS 82-99 is based on various running gags and earlier strips, including Birthday Rant (an analysis on the 2016 birthday comic) and Grande Jatte (referencing an earlier comic punning on A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte).
• Could Say It, But...: "The Fallacy of Glass Houses" attempts to be coy with the fact that it's clearly a stab against a certain other strip: Not only does the transcript mention that Garfield got turned into a phone because he had no room to talk about Peanuts supposedly selling out, but also:
  I had a different idea in mind, but I decided to scale it back as to not start anything.
  
  What can I say? I felt sentimental.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Odie accuses Jon of not knowing any information about the Furry Fandom, aside from the common claims of the media, in No. 150: Is that just cool or what?, since Jon made the false claim that all furries do is have sex. Garfield shows up later to back up Odie's comments. invoked
• Cultural Translation: This strip mirrors the original horizontally to make more sense to people who live in countries who drive on the left side of the road (the author is Australian).
• Cut and Paste Comic:
  • Cut and Paste Comic uses the exact same panel six times in a row, only with different text.
  • Tener Cuidado Con Lo Que Deseas, intentionally.
• Cyclops: Cyclops Garfield shoots his Eye Beams at a pizza.
• Dada Comics: Some strips are straightforward enough. Some...aren't.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Dark Side of the Lasagne.
    Jon: Hey! Why is Odie's bowl covered in blood?
    Garfield: He makes a lovely fire.
  • And Darkfield.
  • Too many to list, really. But the occasional inversion is certainly notable.
• Death of the Author: Invoked in this strip aptly named "Death of the Author", which simply consists of the strip Jon made in "Meta Commentary". The author admits that "death of the author" may not apply given they originally wrote the strip in question, but decided that enough time had passed, and that their original opinion no longer mattered.
• Deconstruction:
  • Of the blender Running Gag.
  • Too Much Carbon changes the ending of a strip where Garfield drinks a whole bottle of soda in a gulp so that instead of burping loudly, he explodes.
  • Played for laughs: "The Dead Past" does this to "The Dead Future" by showing how predicting the past is easy.
• Dedication: Jim Davis as Jon (Happy Birthday, Jim Davis), which came out on Jim Davis' 69th birthday.
• Delayed Ripple Effect: Played with in "For Want of a Grip" in that we only see 1991!Garfield begin to fade out after 1978!Garfield's death.
• Dialogue Tree: Cats of the Old Republic replaces Garfield's original line with five options, in a Shout-Out to the video game Knights of the Old Republic.
• Dinner Deformation: Pan of Lasagna shows the pan stuck in Garfield's stomach.
• Discredited Meme: invoked Discredited Memes is composed of averted and defied versions of SRoMG memes, including Jon decreeing he's never gluing another blender to his face, the final episode of Garfield's Horror Theater, Garfield not killing anything, Garfield deciding we don't need to make some changes around here, Jon's Donut remaining uneaten, and Jon's guacamole remaining unwalked-in.
• Disproportionate Retribution: "Adding Fuel to the Fire" has Jon put Garfield inside a fireplace after he realizes that Garfield mocks him for his fear of not being good enough for his girlfriend Liz.
• Double Entendre: Pulled off by a flower.
  Flower: Hey bee, come get some sweet nectar! Let me rub my pollen all over you!
• Dream Within a Dream: Exaggerated in Recursive Nightmare and Y Combinator Garfield, which enter an infinite loop. Whenever Garfield wakes from his dream, he has the same dream again, then wakes again.
• Driven to Suicide: There are several strip edits where Garfield kills himself or threatens to kill himself.
• Earth All Along: Apparently Garfield lives on Mars.
• Ear Worm: "Garf Done Gone" changes the original strip's non-specific melody to the opening riff of "Love Done Gone" by Billy Currington, which the author cites as an example in its own right.
• Edited for Syndication invoked: Parodied in SRoMG #1275, a rerun of SRoMG #2 that is missing one panel. It also changed the title to Square Root of Minus The Arbuckle Family.
• Easter Egg: "Applied Probability" is an interesting case, in that it was a test of the reading audience to spot such an Egg—unmentioned in the transcript or the Author's Comments, and obfuscated as part of the stated modification, there is also a sign attached to the donut in the original strip, in reference to the "Donut Wars" meme. The stated intention of the author, once this was brought up, was to test whether people would notice such a modification, thereby making the title more direct: "What is the probability of people noticing I did this?"
• Either/Or Title: In a Shout-Out to Dr. Strangelove, we get "Donutception, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Donut (Wars)".
• The End of the World as We Know It:
  • One particular Garfield in 2053 strip was made with this in mind.
    Crazy56U: I've noticed that the "2053" series of comics mainly make fun of Garfield's stagnation. Not once have I seen one that takes advantage of [the] supposed setting of the year 2053. So, naturally, I made a strip implying the world ended in said year.
  • No. 5327: Christmas depicts Garfield in 10078, which is just a disembodied voice in a desolate, barren field. Global war had apparently wiped out all possible life by 2027.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: invoked Parodied in SRoMG 2013-04-24, an edit of Garfield 2003-07-26. In the original Garfield strip, Garfield decides that a picture of a cow, with the word "cow" and an arrow, is a "clever use of symbolism". In the edit, the strip itself has arrows with the words "Jon", "Garfield", "Table", and so on, so the strip is also a clever use of symbolism.
• Even the Subtitler Is Stumped:
  • Every strip has a transcript of the events of the strip. The transcript for Nightmare Fuel Garfield simply said "{Oh, lord, I dunno how to describe this...}", although this was eventually removed and replaced with an actual transcript.
  • The transcript for Tragedy states "Jon has Barry Gibb, or perhaps Robin Gibb, or maybe even Maurice Gibb, glued to his face.".
  • The transcript for Lyman Minus Lyman states that in the third panel, Jon is "looking at nobody, or possibly at Jim Davis' signature".
  • "Manyhills: ?"
  • "Garfield Minus Garfield, Value Added: Mysterious" featuring a Garfield Minus Garfield comic edited to have Jon fade away, and the transcript is confused about whether he's gone or invisible.
  • No. 2112 describes Jon's sweater as "white/gold, or blue/black, or white/black, or blue/gold, or ???".
  • "Monday Night Football" mentions that Jon ran in and startled Garfield "having heard [him complain about Mondays]... somehow".
  • "{Papyrus... I dunno. Stumped transcripter.}"
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Many strips. We'll only list a few that play with Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • Downplayed in "Two Often Used Square Root Of Minus Garfield Memes Combined To Make a Strip of Square Root of Minus Garfield". Self-explanatory enough, but it's a Donut Wars strip with "Stephano" being the donut-eater.
  • Zig-zagged in The Product of Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes over Happy Days. It is a crossover with Calvin and Hobbes, but has nothing to do with Happy Days. The reason it's called that is because the comic of both used involve a character talking about days of the week.
• Face Palm: SRoMG #525 is a collection of face smacks from Garfield strips.
• Failed a Spot Check: "Turn Around, Bright Eyes" alters the 08/09/2015 strip so that Lisa isn't freaking out over seeing Jon, but rather the bear behind him and Garfield.
• Fan Dumb: Invoked, like so many other tropes, in Fan Dumbfield where Garfield discovers the comic and goes into an extremely long rant about it.
• Faux Horrific: The Most Horrific Theatre of All. They stopped making frozen pudding pops.
• Feghoot:
  • The annotation of this strip goes on a horribly long overanalyzation about whether or not you should be bothered by the author's changing of Garfield from orange to grey just to lead up to the punchline "But eventually we'll all just have to come to terms with the fact that there is more than one way to skin a cat."
  • All "364 Days" consists of is a picture of a calendar entry for January 2001, with January 22nd being removed. It wasn't a day at all.
• Flipping the Bird: Implied in Finger, which changes the punchline so that, instead of Jon's date slashing his tires, she is instead waving, with "only one finger" as Garfield points out.
• Footnote Fever: Here, where every object in the strip has one explaining what it is, and here, which has one in the last panel explaining the joke.
• Forced Meme:
  • Done in Kill Liz, where the author's notes reads: "I hope this makes a new Square Root meme." This forced meme was parodied in Garfield = Mass Times Acceleration, which changed Garfield's victim from Liz to a "forced meme".
  • #1440 declares it's now a meme in the title. It was the fourth strip in a Running Gag.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • It was more common in the early days of the strip, but there are a few strips that, while still at least weakly related to Garfield, are not Garfield edits: Edits of other comics (xkcd here, Krazy Kat here, Bob and George here, and Hark! A Vagrant here.), unedited pages about Garfield from comic books or magazines (this from a Ren & Stimpy comic book, and this from a The Electric Company (1971) magazine), a slightly altered verion of a Simon & Garfunkel album cover, and, on one occasion, a printing error a newspaper made when publishing a Garfield comic. Possibly lampshaded in the author's notes for the Krazy Kat strip, which said about the strip "This one may be too meta to fly.".
  • #3644 is just a screenshot of Bracketeering where "Garfield" happened to be the winning play of a round.
  • No. 3170: Embryonic Garfield is just an unaltered Jon comic, with the author noting it would get a Popularity Redo as a syndicated Garfield comic. Since Jon was still deep in obscurity at the time (it won't get any larger recognition until Quinton Reviews covered it in July 28, 2019, while this SRoMG strip was published in January 22, 2018), the author admits he had no idea where he found it.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
  • The ending of "Pupilfield". After apparently turning Jon and Liz into frozen, wide-eyed zombies, the final panel is Garfield staring directly at the reader.
  • "Cat Garfield vs. The World" has Garfield gradually walking up to the reader, to Jon's alarm.
• Franchise Zombie: invoked In-Universe in the "Garfield in 2053" series, in which the comic is still continuing long after Jim Davis is dead, but the current editor refuses to put any effort into it, letting it devolve into a Cut and Paste Comic in which recycled strips are reinterpreted with a single image of Garfield.
• Fun with Acronyms: The official page for Garfield on GoComics.com shows links to the series' Website, Facebook, and Twitter. This strip reverse the latter two's order to reveal an interesting message...
• Fun with Subtitles:
  • Horror Theatre: Blender Pudding Pops! has a transcript that gives the strip, which appears to just be a nonsensical mash up of three memes, a coherent story. Horror Theatre: Jon, the Blender Prophet, episode 2 has a standard transcript, but it also has an alternate one similar to the other strip's transcript.
  • The transcript of Garfieldseed deviates from the traditional format and is written poetically.
  • Both the transcript and authors notes of Garfield Plus an Even Spicier Pepper are written in a narrative format.
  • Taken to an extreme with Garfield plus flavor transcript, in which the comic is almost unchanged but the transcript is especially story-rich.
• Future Imperfect: The premise of The Garfield Code is that Einstein belonged to the Boston Red Sox, and that Einstein and Reagan memorized Garfield strips. The Garfield Code is future fiction from 2529, and will ignore real history as much as The Da Vinci Code does today.

Tropes G-L

• GIS Syndrome: Sometimes viewers Google an image and add it to the strip. Frequently, it's to make a Shout-Out.
• Got Me Doing It: "Know Your Rights" alters the end of the 2010-04-08 strip so that Garfield ends up mixing up the words "right" and "wrong" himself.
• Gratuitous Spanish: ¡Garfield Mexicano! Due to the original's "Blind Idiot" Translation, it was improved by a bilingual fan in ¡Garfield Mexicano, La Versión Mejorada! ("The improved version").
• Green Boy Color: Game Boy Garfield has a comic recolored with the Game Boy's green palette.
• Halloween Episode: Two for 2013: Donut Wars Made Even More Disturbing, which has the sign say "Jon ate Garfield" and recolors Jon to be a zombie with a square root written in blood, and Garfield Meets the Thin Man, a crossover with The Slender Man.
• Hate Fic: invoked While the Author doesn't go into much detail, it is made clear that the #3215th strip (where Jon and Garfield get banned from a restaurant after they uproariously laugh over a stupid joke) was made "in a bad mood". In fact, it was originally going to end with Jon and Garfield being arrested.
• Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: "I was struck by how much the original is framed like a Congressional inquiry."
  Mr. Garfield: {testifying before Congress} People from all across the world seek me out for political advice!
  {beat}
  Senator Jon: Did you recently sell a plan for a coup d'état to a Middle Eastern colonel?
  Mr. Garfield: I need to consult with my lawyer
• Have a Nice Death: Garfield Quest 1: The Lasagna Encounter has a Sierra-style death message appear after Garfield kicks Jon.
• Here We Go Again!: Just as it seemed the pudding pops meme was finally over, the blender meme had to purge the strip buffer.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: This strip, in which Garfield kills Hitler and finds out that they've stopped making frozen pudding pops.
• Hollywood Board Games: In the 1381st strip, Jon and a pissed (probably losing) Garfield are playing Battleship. Garfield then steps over the rather realistic board, which breaks it in half. Jon then complains that he "sunk his battleship", just like the people in the commercials. Garfield snarkily rebukes him that he should have put it on the edge of the grid, which is generally a bad strategy. In the original strip, Garfield ruined Jon's guacamole.
• Impossible Theft: This strip has Garfield somehow steal an old man's pacemaker.
• In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: Inverted: As it happens, the creator behind "Nothing Unusual Here" legitimately forgot they made it.
  Gonna be real here.
  I don't remember making this.
• Interrupted by the End: Backfield Minus Back removes the word "back" from the original strip, thus resulting in the snail only saying three words of the original four before the comic ends.
  D. Gates: The original crammed a four-word phrase into three panels. Backfield improved it by substituting a three-word phrase. Then I thought to myself, "Is a four-panel punchline in a three-panel strip a problem... or an opportunity?"
• In the Style of: 1988 to 1979 redraws the 1988-11-20 strip into the style of the 1979 strips.
• Irony: The date when Garfield begins to fade out after his 1978 self died? July 7th, 1991.
• It Belongs in a Museum: When a mouse in an Indiana Jones hat walks by, this is what Garfield guesses regarding their food.
• It Makes Sense in Context: Utilized in Spot the Difference. Of these weird panels, some are from real Garfield strips, and some are edits. The real ones seem weird here, but they make sense in their original strips. All panels but one are real, and the one that isn't (the fifth one) has a relatively minor change.
• Jenny's Number: "867-5309/Jonny"
  Jon: (on phone) Hello, is this Jenny? / I got it in the wall, why? / Jenny, don't change your number!
  Garfield: 867-5309!
• Jumping the Sharkinvoked: Parodied in Garfield In 2053 Jumps The Shark, a continuation of the "Garfield in 2053" series, which reintroduces Lyman to the comic.
  MadDogBV: After all these years, there aren't very many sharks left for Garfield to jump, but I presume this would be one of them.
• Just One Second Out of Sync: The Trope Namer, with this strip, where Jon hides the cookie jar, then Garfield's Christmas presents.
• Keep It Foreign: In Frenchfield, the original strip is rewritten in French. In the original, Jon thinks that the menu for a restaurant is in French. It's changed from French to English here.
• Lampshade Wearing: Lampshadefield changes the reason that Garfield wears a lampshade. In the original Garfield, "What broken lamp?" In this strip, "What party?"
• Laugh Track: The Author's Notes for Pudding Pops Gag Minus Base Jokes Plus Dedication has the line, "*People laugh like they are in a comedy club.*", after the author mentions the amount of frozen pudding pop strips submitted to the site.
• Lemony Narrator: A few strips have transcripts written like this:
  • De-Wrech:
    {Garfield is performing on the fence again. Why does he do it? It normally results in him getting hit with things.}
    ...
    Garfield: Okay... Who faxed the wrench?
    {This proves Garfield did not slip off the fence, but instead was hit by a somehow-sent-through-the-fax wrench}
  • Galloping Alien:
    {Garfield cranes his neck around in a alarming fashion whilst holding a container of an unknown substance that is entirely unrelated to this plot.}
    Garfield: It's a space alien!
    {Jon looks on amazed as Garfield has resigned calmly to the facts of the situation}
  • Calvin Makes an SRoMG Strip:
    {Calvin and Hobbes are making a strip using scissors and glue instead of on a computer}
    ...
    Hobbes: {he hasn't been able to get any sleep, so he's pretty annoyed} It had sure better.
    ...
    Mom, most likely {off-screen}: Nope.
    ...
    {Calvin has either run off to check his e-mail or spontaneously combusted from the sudden excitement}
    ...
    {Calvin checks from a mailbox maladroitly edited to look like a desktop computer}
  • Sour Milk-Chan:
    {Jon then comes in the room with his tongue and hair sticking out, almost looking like Gene Simmons without make-up}
  • "Garfield is surprised, as indicated by the clearly visible surprise on his face - annotated here with the words "SURPRISED EXPRESSION" for the benefit of the viewer."
  • {Fancy two-panels-wide Garfield title banner. Won’t be described here as it’s irrelevant to the joke}
  • In a strip where Garfield dances on and slips off of the Grinch, the narration notes he's dancing on him "for some unknown reason". When Garfield falls, the narrator goes on to say, "This could have been avoided very easily. He's a bad banana with a greasy black peel, after all."
  • Without Me ends with the following comment by the narrator:
    {apparently, Garfield hates Eminem}
  • VHSfield:
    {[Garfield] seems quite happy, despite the fact that "Jim Davis 6-9" has been written on the side of his chair}
  • Monday Night Football:
    {Jon, having heard Garfield... somehow, rushes in while yelling, startling Garfield}
    ...
    {Garfield has been tackled to the ground by Jon, and has been really messed up by the ordeal. Trust me.}
  • After two Garfields walk by in Ice Ice Baby, dressed as the Ice Climbers:
    Jon: And no, you're not getting into Smash 4!
    {Rub it in, why don't ya...}
    {...}
    {...jerk...}
  • Once Again, Your Guess Is As Good As Mine deserves special mention:
    {Garfield stands over a sleeping Jon, angry and with cheeks puffed up}
    {slowly, as if to be an affront to nature itself, Garfield's head starts expanding}
    {apparently having heard that previous comment, Garfield's head proceeds to take up the entire panel and then, presumably, the world}
    —-
    {And taking a look at the long-range forecast, continued cat hair, darkness and extreme fat.}
    {This is Crazy56U.}
    {Good night.}
    {...}
    {...goodbye...}
  • Muppetfield (or Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sedentary Street?)
    {Cuts away to a vexingly strange segment featuring Jon Arbuckle and some mice singing about the letter S, thankfully not shown}
  • As if you needed more proof that the author had made the strip while in a bad mood, the transcript for #3215 includes the following:
    {Jon and Garfield look at each other in wide-eyed shock, because apparently that one question was the most mind-breaking, Earth-shattering question of all time}
    {Jon and Garfield start violently laughing, because either that one question was the funniest thing ever of all time, or comedy is now dead}
    {Suddenly, waiter}
    {The waiter looks at them while Jon and Garfield have stupid grins on their faces, as if prodding the waiter to take part in their nonsense}
    ...
    {Count your lucky stars I chose to go soft on you guys in this strip, Jon. The alternate ending sees you and Garfield getting arrested.}
  • The Personification of Hubris in an Uncaring World:
    {amidst a sea of hubris, a man speaks to his cat}
    Jon: You know what the world needs more of?
    Jon: Conceptual art
    {No}
    {It does not}
  • invoked A particularly egregious example can be seen in Strip #4843, as the Author had decided (apropos of nothing) to make a strip entirely without dialogue.
    {Just as a warning, there is no dialogue in this strip, and I'm being extra descriptive. Buckle up}
    {Sam Beckett is at a bar, enjoying a beer in the morning, proving he is currently in the past. The bartender is putting away some money in a cash register}
    [...]
    {The transcript's author is now probably regretting doing an eight-panel comic with no dialogue}
    {C'est la vie}
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: invoked
  • This gold embossed version of the very first strip of Garfield.
  • This strip (containing a DVD exclusive) is named so. They also linked back to the page of this trope in the author's note.
    • High-Definition Remaster of the aforementioned strip.
• Literal Metaphor: Discussed in the author's note of Jon's Revenge, a strip that involves Garfield exploding after eating too much food.
  U. N. Owen: I think a lot of SRoMG strips can be made by thinking, "what if they meant that literally?"
• Loophole Abuse: Garfield Discovers "Loud Commercial"
  Crazy56U: This immediately jumped to my head when I discovered the titular SROMG strip. After all, it's not a "Garfield Linus Garfield" joke^note The description for "Loud Commercial" asks for no "Garfield Linus Garfield" jokes., so I'm justified in doing this. Loopholed!

Tropes M-R

• Made of Explodium:
  • Volatile Odie Minus Everyone Else has Odie explode after falling off a table.
  • In Armchair Warrior, Garfield scratching a chair makes it blow him up.
  • Jon Explodes Easily is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Garfield in this comic.
  • T-Balloon! has a balloon that literally blows up after smiling at Jon.
• The Many Deaths of You: Parodied in Choose Your Own Garfield #2, where choosing to not taking a break leads to everything exploding.
• Mayan Doomsday: End of the Worldfield is inspired by the author's attempt to view a mezzacotta strip taking place on the day after the alleged apocalypse. 2012-12-21, meanwhile, edits the actual Garfield strip that fell on the "apocalypse" to have Jon say, "Besides, the world is ending today."
• Meaningful Release Dateinvoked:
  • A few strips with Shout Outs have the release dates of the original strips be relevant to the thing being referenced:
    • Garfield Plus 88 MPH, in which Garfield throws the DeLorean on Nermal, is made from the 10/25/1985 strip, the date it was successfully tested in the first movie.
    • In a similar vein, Director's Cut combines the script of the 05/25/1990◊ strip with Back to the Future Part III, which released the same day.
    • I know that was then but it could be againfield contains one panel from every Garfield corresponding to a date the England men's national football team was eliminated from a major tournament since the strips debut captioned with the lyrics to "Three Lions" by Baddiel, Skinner & the Lightning Seeds, a song about still having faith in the team despite their constant failure.
    • Pac-field recreates the 5/22/1980 Garfield strip, the date Pac-Man was first released, with sprites from the game.
    • Garfield vs Lemmings edits the Garfield strip that was published on February 14th, 1991, which is the release date of the first Lemmings game. Instead of Garfield being grumpy because he's good at it, he's grumpy because he can't beat Mayhem 29.
    • All ten strips in the "Garfield Numerosity" comic strip series were published throughout 2023, with the month and the day representing the number being featured. For example, the first one was published on January 1st (01-01), while the tenth was published on October 10th (10-10).
    • One actually not relevant to the strip: The leader of the Round Robin Total Substitution Garfield said he found the date of the strip he used by starting at the strip published the release date of "Your Woman" by White Town (1/23/1997) and working forwards until he found a strip with a good amount of dialogue and some interesting visuals, resulting in the 2/13/1997 strip being used.
  • Some other strips instead alter the strip that was published on the author's DOB. One example of this played straight is Fishing trip. A few contributors have put their own spin on this idea:
    • Birthday Garfield had this as its whole premise, with one panel from the strips corresponding to the DOB of the author, his wife, and his daughter.
    • ASCIIfield was done with the strip of the date of the author's first kiss.
    • Badly Translated Garfield was done with the strip of the DOB of the author's sister.
    • The Garfield Story saw the Author pull together every strip that was made from his DOB to the (at the time) present, took from that the strips with increments of 5 ("for simplicity"), and then pulled out random panels from each in order to cobble together a narrative of Garfield falling into a life of crime.
    • Z is for Zaragoza changes Garfield's snore from a picture of a log being sawn in honor of National Cartoonists' Day to a picture of the Mexican flag — cut into a Z so it's still Garfield snoring — in honor of Cinco de Mayo, the publication date of both the original strip and the Square Root of Minus Garfield edit.
    • Jon As _________ was published on the submitter's birthday, and likewise uses six strips that came out on their birthday during six different years.
  • On the other hand, certain strips utilize publishing dates of Garfield strips in interesting ways:
    • The "Birthday Special" series of strips is each based on a birthday strip, tying into the publishing order of the SRoMG strips. For example, the 1978th strip, published on October 18, 2014, is based on Garfield's first birthday strip, originally published on June 19, 1978, while the 2014th strip, published on November 23, 2014, is based on Garfield's latest birthday strip, originally published on June 19, 2014. These strips are the fruits of a collaborative project by the Comics Irregulars. Then there's a REAL final strip of the series where Odie attempts to access the 2015 birthday strip.
    • The Dead Future takes the 2003-11-25 strip, in which Jon wonders what they would see five years from now, and replaces the last panel with the one for the strip, published five years from that day.
    • Likewise, there's the two response strips The Dead Past and The Dead Future Redux. The former changes the strip into being about looking five years into the past, and as such replaces the last panel with the one for the 11/25/1998 strip, and the later replaces the 2008 Garfield panel used in "The Dead Future" with the last panel of "Qwantzfield", which also was published 11/25/2008.
    • 2012-12-21 has the strip of the Mayan Doomsday altered so Jon mentions it.
  • Played straight and (unintentionally) subverted in Disaster Days. The author's intent was to use panels from the dates of the Challenger explosion, the premiere of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, and the beginning of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; the correct dates were used for the first two events, but the wrong year was used for the third. The author felt it apropos to leave it, as it had something in common with the three disasters now.
  • Twin Peaksfield: In honor of the return of Twin Peaks, the author took its first panel from the day the original show premiered, its second panel from the day the show ended, and its third panel from the day its movie came out.
  • "Jon's Boo-Boo, Reversed" Remake came out on the three-year anniversary of the strip that it remasters.
• Medium Blending:
  • Both "Plush Garfield" comics are photos, of various plush toys and David Morgan-Mar himself, edited to recreate Garfield comics.
  • Plushfield has a comic recreated with plush Garfield and Odie toys, the comic being real-life pictures with text bubbles overlaid.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • "1000th Root of Minus Garfield" celebrates the comic's 1000th strip, with a mosiac made out of previous submissions.
  • Comics 1978-2015 are celebrations of Garfield's birthdays, each one being based on the birthday comic (June 19th) that released that year.
  • Comic 3000 is "Mystery Science Garfield 3000", an adaptation of the 1989 Halloween arc with a spectating audience making fun of it.
  • Comic 3467 is "SRoMG, Vol. 1", pictures of a real-world book with a compendium of SRoMG comics inside.
  • Comic 4000, "Memes Are Bad", is a frozen pudding pops variant in which Garfield yells at Jon for letting the 4000th milestone be ruined with a meme.
  • Comic 5000 is "We Didn't Write The Garfield", a parody of [[Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" that highlights a recap of past submissions from the history of the comic itself.
• Mind Screw:
  • Weird art and total nonsense in GARFFITI.
  • One Warped Wish. No summary can come close to doing it justice. All that can be said is that it involves the fabric of reality being destroyed.
  • Neither of these hold a candle to Fishing trip, though.
  • Your Guess Is As Good As Mine
• Multiple Endings: Choose your own Garfield brings together every version of the Running Gag where Jon sees Garfield's tail coming out of his fern. The first two panels play out exactly the same in every strip involved, and thus are only shown once; then the final panels for each version branch out, as if indicating to the reader to choose the strip's ending.
• My Brain Is Big: Huge Ugly Heads gives Jon a simply enormous cranium, and links to the page.
• Naked People Are Funny: In this one, Jon locked himself out of the house naked. Garfield walks away and tells him to use the pet door. Which is boarded in.
• Narm: invoked The original Narm scene is parodied in Six Layers of Lasagna Under.
• Negative Continuity: The aplty-titled Negative Continuity features a strip where Jon can hear Garfield's thought-speak, right above a strip where he can't.
  KelpTheGreat: It's almost as if Jim Davis just makes up the rules of his strip to tell whatever joke he wants to tell. Either that, or Jon developed hearing loss in the eight months between these two strips.
• New Year Has Come: Starting with 2016, some comics celebrate New Year's and New Year's Eve. Of course, they're posted on the appropriate day in real life.
  • NYE 2016: Boring New Year, where Garfield, Odie, and Jon are bored while waiting for the ball to drop.
  • 2017: 2017 Will Be Better, where Garfield says, "It hasn't even started yet, and it's still better than last year." The author notes that everyone hated 2016.
  • 2018: So This Is The New Year. Garfield walks off a table after showing that the new year is on a Monday.
  • 2019: Feels About The Same, which mixes panels between the 1980 and 1981 Garfield New Year's comics.
  • 2020: 1980, a Spiritual Sequel to Feels About The Same. This time, Garfield wakes up and explains that he likes 1981 because it's not 1980.
  • 2021: Every single time, where Jon gets confused between 2020 and 2021. Garfield responds, "I'm just glad we're not in 2020 anymore!"
  • NYE 2021: Be it resolved, which has Jon giving up on his New Year's resolutions before he can even think of any.
  • 2022: New Year, New Start, New World, Same Traffic. Jon dashes out of his house to celebate the new year, only to run into traffic.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Telepathic Pirate Garfield.
• No-Dialogue Episode: "From the Network That Couldn't Be Bothered to Spell "Beckett" Correctly In The Closing Minutes" consists of eight Quantum Leap screencaps, with no one speaking in any of them, much to the chagrin of the Author when they had to write the transcript.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • Among others, Garfield Meets the Thin Man, actually a crossover with The Slender Man Mythos. The strip was specifically named to avoid spoiling Slendy's presence.
  • Alphabetical Blender has nothing to do with blenders. The author explains that he confused this comic for the "I glued a blender to my face" one, but kept the title because of how strange it is and felt it made his submission funnier.
• Non Sequitur: Reverse Alphabetical Ordering:
  Jon: You know, Garfield... I've made a few mistakes in my life. I mean aardvark.
• Noodle Incident: In the author's note of Teaser:
  ...but apparently the original comic confused some people when it came out. One thing led to another, and now I rule the state of Montana. Which is kind of strange because I don't actually live in Montana.
• No Title: Strip #1527 is the only strip with no title, even though every other SRoMG strip has a title. (Original Garfield strips have no titles.) Lampshaded.
  Garfield: They didn't even title this strip
• Note from Ed.: The author's notes occasionally contain messages from the people who approve the strips.
  (#2384) Nonetheless, I wager it'll be a cold day in hell before this strip sees the light of day. (Ed: It's certainly a cold day in my apartment.)
  (#3687) This one's for you, DMM. And to a lesser extent*, the new handler of the SRoMG strips. [...] [*Ouch! -Ed]
  (#3952) [I feel obliged to share that the image for this submission was sent with filename "why would you willingly buy crash bash.png". -Ed]
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer: The author's note to Milk and Cookies:
  MichaelSar: Theodore Rex, for those unaware, is a 1996 direct-to-video buddy cop film starring Whoopi Goldberg and a dinosaur who loves milk and cookies. I did not make any of that up. The film actually exists.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Discussed in relation to Odie in this strip.
• Oddball in the Series:
  • Doubling as a heartwarming moment, amidst the usual fare of inexplicable, abstract (whether mathematically or otherwise), reference-laden and snarky strips, there's the Lighter and Softer "Garfield comic by Skye"^note made by a young girl which was ultimately posted on the site despite being made with an official Garfield comic creator that prohibited the distribution of comics made with it.
• Original Flavour: Odie's Least Favorite Dog Story is a wholly-original strip, emulating Garfield's artsyle from the early 1980s, concerning Garfield using the threat of reciting Greyfriars Bobby in order to force Odie to make him a sandwich.
• ...Or So I Heard: In "Blubber Lumps! They're chewy!", Garfield says that certain types of lumps of blubber can go for a pretty penny on Ebay. Or so he heard...
• Out of Order: DanielBT's three-part "Manga Garfield" series ended up being published in the wrong order, with the final part coming before the middle. According to Daniel's blog, he had submitted so many comics that they had to be rotated for variety, resulting in the mix-up.
• Overly Long Gag: Happens when someone cuts and pastes the same thing again and again.
  • A Strip. With. A Snail. Who does nothing for 13 panels.
  • Invoked and defied in Déjà Vu All Over Again, which repeats the joke only 5 times. It comes complete with a link back to us.
  • Jon's Chat Screen: Too many users leave the chat room. "OverlyLongGag has left the chat room".
  • Looky Looky: "Looky, looky, looky, looky..."
  • Overly Long Walk: "More trees... more ferns... more trees... more ferns..."
  • Dull and Repetitive: Jon repeatedly tells Garfield that they are dull and repetitive.
• Overly Preprepared Gag: As confirmed on the forums, "The Pass" and "Show Don't Tell"^note a pair of strips involving Garfield making a carrot disappear]] were structured to be uploaded exactly one year apart.
• Overused Running Gag:
  • The voluminous number of "Garfield (pun for Minus) Garfield" comics are referenced in these two strips as being way too overbearing.
  • The "frozen pudding pops" strip^note When Jon reads the newspaper and remarks, "The world is constantly changing," prompting Garfield to reply, "They haven't stopped making frozen pudding pops yet, have they?" has been edited so often (usually with Garfield or the "pudding pops" line being replaced with something else) that the mods are deliberately slow to publish any more edits of that strip, and most modern strips that are published just lampshade how overdone the parody is. This strip and its description bemoan how often this strip is parodied.
  "Contributors, it's time to end this rampage of strips. SRoMG is a beautiful website, and this meme has done nothing but corrupt its splendor. The extra-slow queue has done nothing. There are still many, many strips in it. Manyhills, you're delaying the inevitable. After this strip goes in, I urge you to not even put the pudding pops strips in a separate buffer. Unless they're very good, I urge you to warn the contributor and then straight up delete them. This madness must end."
• Painting the Medium:
  • Small Talk (which prints the text very small), Variations on a Haircut #1, and Melt (wherein the comic itself melts)
  • Unfini takes a comic about an unfinished show and does this to i
  • The Problem with Webcomic Buffers was posted on Lightning Made of Owls, while the real LMOO strip, Web Affair, ended up on SRoMG.
• Paranoia Fuel: invoked Jon, Paranoid
• Parody Commercial: Garfield Shrink & Re-enlarge, Part 3 and Garfield Shrink & Re-enlarge, Part 4 are joke commercials for the "Cat-onball", just a live bomb one puts in their pool.
• Pokémon Speak: This trope is lampooned in Pokémon Speak:
  Odie: Dog dog.
  Garfield: Cat cat.
  Jon: Man man man man.
• Punctuation Changes the Meaning:
  • He may move slow, he can't jump high edits in a wrapped Chunky Kong and has Garfield ask about it, and removes the comma from Nermal's "it's a gift, chunky", so that instead of Nermal snidely talking about his gift of being cute while calling Garfield "chunky", he's giving Garfield a "gift Chunky".
  • This strip removes the comma from the original strip to turn Jon's snarky "It's time for you to eat, your majesty" into "It's time for you to eat your majesty." To complete the edit, Jon is dressed up in a king, with the implication that Garfield's going to eat him.
• Race Lift: Garfield Recoloured makes Jon black and, as a Parodied Trope, makes Garfield grey instead of orange, which leads up to a pun.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: In The Burp That Was Giant, Garfield lets out a burp so big that it breaks the laws of physics, distorting reality and ripping open a hole in space and time to reveal Lyman in a dungeon.
• Reboot Snark: "Garfield Plus Another One of Disney's Live-Action Remakes" takes a jab at the 2019 live-action remake of Aladdin and how creepy the live-action Genie looks, as he pops out of the cookie jar and Garfield runs screaming.
• Recursive Reality: Recursive Thinking Garfield uses nested thought bubbles, and Recursive Garfield Redux depicts Garfield drawing a copy of the strip. There might be no true Garfield, if each Garfield is always a drawing made by the next outer Garfield.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: Garfield IN SPACE! takes a strip where Garfield uses the word "space" multiple times, and changes the scenery to make him appear as if he's actually in space.
• Recycled Script invoked:
  • This webcomic has noted and mocked a large quantity of recycled scripts from the original Garfield. It's a Running Gag at this point! The standard technique is to take two similar Garfield strips and swap parts of them.
  • Also parodied when four months after each other, a pair of strips by the same author ran that both involved Garfield randomly attacking an empty table, causing Jon to comment "I liked that silence.". The author then commented "If Jim Davis can recycle gags, so can I".
• Recursive Translation:
  • Garfield: Lost in Translation Minus Garfield, Lost In Translation Garfield, Garfield Happily Lost In Translation (Japanese) and Badly Translated Garfield.
  • Although not as mangled as any of the above, Reunion is a case of this as well, via Hungarian.
• Re-Cut: In-universe, "Director's Cut" concerns a very questionable one of Back to the Future Part III where Marty and Mad Dog eat a cat◊.
• Reference Overdosed: Many SRoMG strips insert references to other works. See the list of Shouts Out.
• Remix Comic: One of many Garfield remixes.
• Repetitive Audio Glitch: There are several edits of Garfield 1985-06-30, which originally featured a record player stuck in a loop.
  • Garfield upgrades to a CD player in urururururururur, but the CD player is skipping.
  • The record player returns in Jaggerfield, just with a different song.
  • Played with in Black Eyed Garfield by way of The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling". There's no glitch; the song really does repeat itself like a Broken Record. Which in turn spawned this derivation using "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)" by The Beatles.
• Re Run: A somewhat interesting case: The February 2nd 2021 strip^note Note the date was the first intentional full repeat of a previous strip, as a Shout-Out to Groundhog Day.
• Retconjuration: Earth Angel has Jon using his power to alter the timeline and erase the day of August 5th, 2009.
  So you're saying it wasn't a day at all?
• Ret-Gone: Garfield inadvertently does this to himself (and presumably Jon and Odie as well) in this comic. (An edit of this comic.)
• Ripped from the Headlines: This strip is inspired by Bill Murray (who voiced Garfield in the live-action films) dating Kelis (who's best known for her song "Milkshake").
• Rocket Jump: In Rock-cat Jumps Aren't Cute.
  Nyperold: Why should we assume that his landings are causing minor seismic events? Let's make it his propulsion method!
• Round Robin: Several:
  • Exquisite Garfield, in which one contributor removed the dialogue from three strips of Garfield watching TV and and gave each panel for a different contributor to put dialogue in. Each contributer was only allowed to see their blank panel (and the one before it for every second and third). The results were Garfield viewing a documentary about mutant grass, an infomercial for a machine that lets you enjoy your favorite meal by putting your finger into it, and a cliched show about blowing up lasagna.
  • Garfield Replacement where the first panel was deleted from a comic and given for one contributor to fill in. The edited version than had its second panel removed, and so on. This resulted in a strip where Garfield celebrates being elected into "The Bad Habits Hall of Fame" by crumpling and tossing the certificate becoming Garfield reviewing Jon's anti-littering tract.
  • "Garfield Shrink & Re-enlarge", in which four participants work with reinterpretations of the same Sunday comic, first compressing it into a daily comic, then further compressing it into a single panel, and finally reversing the process for the last two comics. The catch? No one is allowed to view the original Sunday comic. This resulted in a strip where Garfield dives into a pool Jon is in being turned into a commercial for the explosive "cat-onball".
  • Total Substitution Garfield, where a strip with deleted dialogue was sent to one contributor, and the transcript to another. Each person than made something to fill in the missing part, and both of their creations were combined into one strip. The result wasn't as radically different as the others, it was a strip where Jon proves that everything you want, you can get in the city by buying a bad suit from a hitman, into that same hitman disproving Jon's point about neighborhood walks being quiet and peaceful. Garfield is also more excited about being in the city in the new art.
• Rube Goldberg Device: This comic has Garfield rig an elaborate device made of household items to wake up Jon and seal him into the ground with cement. Unfortunately for Garfield, Jon wakes up early.
• Running Gag: Now has its own page.
• Running Gagged:
  • Garfield Skynet Garfield: Judgement Day. After endless variations of the discredited Pudding Pops meme (including five consecutive ones before this), the joke was finally killed off. Following a two-month break, We Needed Some Change announced that Pudding Pops comics would be allowed again, but only interesting parodies and subversions, and they'd be released very infrequently to avoid oversaturating the site.
  • Discredited Memes does this with the Blender, "Garfield's (sounds like horror) Theater", "I must kill something!", "Changefield", "Donut Wars", and "Bad Mood" strips.
  • After a string of five "Doog" jokes over a month, "Another Step Further" marked the official end, with the mod asking people not to make any more variations on it. However, it came back in "ne", after a five-year absence. Another Doog joke was published eight months later.
• Russian Reversal: Not one, not two, but three Donut Wars strips in "Donut Wars In Soviet Russia" alter the original strip to say "Jon's Donut/Ate Garfield".

Tropes S-Z

• Science Marches On:invoked The "Garfield Plus Updated Palaeontology" series updates this Garfield strip to be more accurate.
• Scunthorpe Problem: Here, wherein "classics" becomes "clbottomics".
• Sdrawkcab Speech: Used in Sdrawkcab, where a punchline about talking backwards is read backwards and then reversed.
• Seasonal Rot: Invoked by the author of #1527, who linked to the trope page. In-Universe, Garfield complains, "this comic is going downhill", and lists the problems with the day's comic.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Attack of the Memes mocks the large number of strips which are just memes.
  • Self-Deprecation.
    And now, a list of the funniest SRoMG strips ever shown on this website!
    *two beat panels*
  • "Turn Around, Bright Eyes" is an interesting case: the author admits that when they got the idea for it, they realized it was stupid... and made it anyway.
    True story, after reading this strip for the first time and coming up with what you see before you, I said to myself "Wait, no, that's stupid". But being stupid never stopped me before!
  • Similarly, from the same author, there's "Meta Commentary", as it is a strip built around a different strip that was intented to be submitted before they realized it was bad.
    Jon: (at the computer, talking to Garfield) Check out this SRoMG strip I made, Garfield!
    (cut to the strip, where Garfield enters his "time travel machine", causing the strip's date to change... and nothing else)
    Jon: (blankly staring at the computer) No, wait, this is terrible...
    • And then almost seven years later, the author resubmitted the strip without the Framing Device as "Death of the Author", purely on the grounds that they no longer care about their original stance on the comic.
  • SRoMG Plus My Attention Span is a jab at the author's forgetful nature.
  • This comic pokes fun at the comic itself, particularly at how enormous of a backlog of submitted comics the comic has, via Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!.
  • He may move slow, he can't jump high has Manyhill's author's note, done to the tune of the DK Rap:
    This comic may not be strong, but it definitely isn't funny.
  • "I'm beginning to worry about SROMG"
• Serial Escalation: Some of the comics do this with the removal of characters. The pinnacle is (possibly) reached in strip #152, Garfield Minus Garfield Minus Jon Minus Odie Minus Nermal Minus Arlene Minus Lyman Minus Liz Minus Pookie, which removes every recurring character, leaving only the dog from one strip. (Although, of course, the joke there is that the only recurring character to appear in the original strip WAS Garfield.)
• Shout-Out: A whole page of them.
• Slow-Loading Internet Image: While there's no punchline, and it's a non-pornographic image, the spirit is certainly there in this strip.
• Sphere Eyes: Lampshaded in 2011-10-09: "Your eyes look like hard-boiled eggs."
• Spin-Off: iToons, which is the same idea, except you can now use (almost) any other comic strip, newspaper or web, instead of Garfield.
• Splash of Color:
  • "Colour, coming through." Though Garfield is a color comic, many newspapers print it in black and white from Monday to Saturday. This edit just mixes the two formats.
  • An earlier strip, "Frank Miller's Garfield", is a more usual example. The strip is grayscale, except for anything red or yellow.
• Sprite Comic:
  • Garfield: The Video Game uses sprites from a Japan-only Famicom game, Garfield: A Week of Garfield.
  • The sprites also appear in two crossover strips: #822 with Final Fantasy, and #933 with 8-Bit Theater.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: "Not So Grump?" shows that three separate people got the idea to make a certain edit to "Grump Out!"... and two of them went about it the same way... And those two were submitted the same day...
  • There have been other examples (For example), but "Not So Grump?" takes pride of place for being the strangest idea multiple people had at the same time.
  • Sort of topped (in numbers, if not in strangeness) by Look Back in Languor 2: Look Back-er, a strip which turned out to have been submitted by no less than five people independently of each other.
• Stealth Insult: "Catch-22 (Is Not The Film Being Referenced)" not only uses a similar joke as "Garfield Minus Garfield Plus John Garfield" (but with a bigger photo), but it also has the same description... minus one change.
  John Garfield was a movie actor famous for films such as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Humoresque, and Gentleman's Agreement.
  
  He also wasn't squished.
• Stealth Pun: "The Pinnacle of Wit" is a list of U.S. presidents in reverse order... minus Garfield.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • Downplayed with Another Reason To Have Adblock: it recreates the "Dermatologists Hate Him" meme, and intentionally includes an error in it through its use of a screencap from "Fair Exchange"^note the "ad" assumes Jon's head turned into Garfield's, when in reality Garfield (in taking on Jon's role) gained Jon's body.
  • Director's Cut is stated to have the Closed Captioning on, and as such in a few of the panels, part of the captioning from the previous panel remains on screen.
  • The "Garfield Minus Any Kind of Artistic Talent" series consists of poorly-drawn recreations of Garfield comics.
  • Paintfield (#4475) is the first comic remade in Microsoft Paint.
  • AIfield has Jon remark that everything is made by AI, and tell Garfield the chicken was made with AI. The last panel shows Garfield (whose face and arms are now disfigured) burping, with the thought bubble showing a deformed version of the word "burp".
  • shirt was created entirely with Microsoft Paint.
• Subverted Trope:
  • Discussed in the author's note to #233, as to why a strip beginning with "Your pointy elbows give me a headache" just doesn't work:
  "The purpose of a joke like this, as used in many other strips, not to mention almost ubiquitously in The Simpsons, is setting up an expectation and then humorously defying it. Jon's nonsensical statement about Garfield's "pointy elbows" sets up no expectations to defy in the third panel (and, come to think of it, my cat doesn't even have elbows)."
  • "Wait, why didn't Linus show up?"
  • Also used as the title of #1011 Subverted Trope. (This strip subverts the Running Gag started by Eyeballfield where Jon's face is altered to match Garfield's; this time, it's Garfield's face which is altered.)
• Suddenly Speaking: "Talking Garfield" replaces Garfield's Thought Bubble Speech with actual speech in the name of improved execution of the punchline.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Garfield Minus Toon Physics edits this comic to remove the Amusing Injuries, namely those inflicted when the refrigerator falls on Garfield. The result is...rather frightening.
  Jon (holding Garfield's flattened mishapen body): GARFIELD! SPEAK TO ME! SPEHEHEHEAK!!
  • Instead of Jon and Garfield's loud laughter prompting the waiter to join in, they are forced to leave the restaurant and are banned for life.
  • This comic takes the 12/23/16 strip◊ and has Jon do a Double Take and scream after seeing Garfield and Odie's exaggeratedly excited expressions.
• Surreal Humor: The comedy is as likely to come from a weird mismatch of setup and punchline as anything else.
• Symbol Swearing:
  • Grawlixes make the dialogue in Grawfield. This trope is also used here.
  • Averted in this one, which keeps the "ass" uncensored while reprinting the lyrics of Chase Rice's "Ready Set Roll".
• Take a Third Option:
  • For "It's Fun", the strip's author stated that they saw two ways the original Billy Brick comic could've gone differently^note They don't go into any further detail, but just by looking at the strip one can guess the two options.. They chose both.
  • "Four Times the Comedy", by the same author, acknowleded there were only two ways to do a follow-up to "Triple Espresso"^note itself a follow-up to "Double Espresso", itself a follow-up to a comic where Garfield drank espresso, only for his eyes to get big; each follow-up opted to make Garfield's eyes bigger per incriment of espresso: leaning further into absurdism^note making Garfield's eyes bigger than the Earth itself or leaning into realism^note Garfield dying from too much caffeine. They instead chose Anti-Humor.
    Garfield: I wonder why they call this a quadruple espresso? (sips)
    (cut to black)
    (blank space)
    Garfield: (looks at cup) I never filled this, did I?
• Take Our Word for It:
  • "You Know WHO ELSE Is Slow!?" claims to feature "a real-life Sonic with the shell of the original snail", but the Slow-Loading Internet Image breaks before we get to see even part of it.
  • Apparently, Garfield got "really messed up" from Jon tackling him.
    Trust me.
  • "Supertaskfield" is a demonstration of one of Zeno's paradoxes in comic form, where there are a supposedly infinite amount of panels, each a fraction as large as the last. The transcript claims that the strip supposedly ends with this:
  {In the final panel Garfield completes his walk around the block}
  Garfield: In a finite amount of time!
• Take That!: Enough for its own page.
• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • invoked Referenced by name in the title of this strip. The dog's name is changed to "Scrappy".
  • Subverted in this strip, which depicts Scrappy-Doo himself stuck having to sort through the comic's rejected strips, but the comic treats this as an unhappy fate for him rather than a deserved one.
• Technology Marches On:invoked Noted in #1358, which shows Garfield's mechanical scale from 1998 next to his digital scale from 2012.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Going with the Flow. "Come on, world! Whatever happens, happens!" Cue the house crashing on top of Garfield.
  • Also used as a title.
• That Came Out Wrong: invokedThis comic edits the infamous "who greased my wiener?" comic so that Jon facepalms in embarrassment after he realizes what he just said.
  Jon: Clear your head, Jon. There has to be a logical explanation for this, other than the comment that came out of my big mouth.
• That's What She Said: Rubbery Arugula. Comes with a bonus strip◊ that the editor deemed too risqué. It's done again here here.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: These two alter a strip when Garfield almost falls off a table trying to get some food so he actually gets the food. In the first, he launches it in the air by hitting the plate, climbs back up, and catches it in his mouth. The second is the same, except he gets back on the table using portals.
  • Kick the Dog: Meanwhile, one particular strip went in the opposite direction.
• Time Bomb: Time Bomb and Blowing Out the Bomb. In both cases, we don't see the bomb, but the characters see the timer. In both cases, the bomb blows up!
• Toilet Humour: In Potty Humour, the brown stuff in the toilet is a copy of Garfield's food from Garfield 2004-06-03.
  • Toilet Humour gives us the dread felt by Jon's Sentient Toilet.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Pudding pops for Garfield, who's constantly worried about their removal.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Well, at least Jon did learn not to put out a bomb by blowing on it.
  • "Happy diet, Garfield. Here's a handgun for breakfast." (We don't actually see Garfield shooting Jon, but he holds it out and thinks "Bang!")
• Torch the Franchise and Run:invoked #3932 and its author's note are about a hypothetical conclusion to Garfield where Jim Davis, knowing he's not long for this world, decides to end the strip on his own terms. The author's note describes a sequence where Jon and Liz's relationship falls apart throughout the first half of 2027 and she breaks up with him. Jon ends up distraught, culminating in a Wham Episode on June 19th (the strip proper) where instead of the usual annual birthday celebration, Garfield and Odie find Jon's hanging body. The comic ends the following Sunday with Garfield and Odie deciding to pursue a new life as stray animals.
• [Trope Name]:
  • Meta-Garfield and Garfield Abridged parody the Strictly Formula nature of the original strip.
  • Garfield [something that sounds a bit like "minus"] Garfield does this to the Garfield Linus Garfield meme; it features an "image related to [the] middle word of the title".
  • Comic title simplifies a strip about Jon playing on the ice down to the general vibe of each line, and also replaces the name in the header panel with "COMIC TITLE".
• Unsound Effect:
  • A strip which uses "Hammer" as an Unsound Effect gets turned on its head in Garfield With Even More Inappropriate Sound Effect.
  • Two Words from Our Sponsors uses the sound effect "*sasquatch*" when Garfield leaves to get food during a commercial break.
  • If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You uses the sound effect "NOPE" for orange pop coming out of a bottle.
  • In Make It Big, the sound effect "HAM!" is used to denote Garfield garnishing his salad with a ham.
• Ur-Example: Garfield Minas Garfield predates Garfield Linus Garfield by about 4 months. The latter one definitely counts as the Meme Maker and the Meme Codifier, though.
• Urine Trouble: You're in Trouble, Jon removes Garfield, his thought balloons, and the water balloon, and reuses the first panel's version of the lower half of Jon's body, leaving only one source for the yellow-recolored liquid puddling on the floor around his feet... (Well, two, but the puddle is colored yellow, not brown.)
• Versus Title:
  • Garfield vs. the Laugh-Out-Loud Cats, in which a giant Garfield appears to challenge the protagonists of Laugh-Out-Loud Cats.
  • Garfield versus Odie's Dark Abyss of a Soul. Garfield loses.
  • Garfield vs. Garfield, a take on MAD Magazine's Spy vs. Spy comics. A black-hatted Garfield rolls a snowball down a hill, which hits a white-hatted Garfield.
  • Garfield vs. Laser, where Garfield chases a laser point relentlessly.
  • Garfield versus Zombies, in which a group of three zombies grab Garfield's leg.
  • Garfield vs Lemmings, where Garfield destroys Jon's PC because he can't beat a hard level in Lemmings.
• Visual Pun: Square Root of Minus Garfield is a square tree-root of a color-inverted "minus" Garfield.
• Wall of Text:
  • Spoilerwarningfield, where the TV recites Wikipedia's summary of Moby-Dick.
  • The comic and the annotation here have one praising Garfield and SRoMG, respectively.
• Waxing Lyrical: Several strips engage in this. See the "Music" section of this page.
• Writer on Board: No. 2954 Garfield's Birthday Rant is essentialy the strip's author using Garfield as a mouthpiece to complain about how underwhelming Garfield's 38th birthday strip was.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: In NESField 3, Garfield goes to a castle find frozen pudding pops, only to find Jon has gotten there first.
• Your Television Hates You: This strip, where Garfield watches TV and every show on is something that has been referenced at least once in an earlier SRoMG comic.

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