YMMV / Square Root of Minus Garfield

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Lampshaded in the author notes of this comic, which takes the first ever Garfield comic and replaces Garfield with Liz while keeping the dialogue mostly intact. (Thus Liz asks Jon to "Feed me" at the end.)
  • Liz and Jon's Father Minus Jon but Plus Each Other. The author says that he hopes it doesn't seem vulgar.
    Jon's father: I GOTTA MILK SOMETHING!
    Liz: Could you make it through the night if I said no?
    Jon's father: Yes.
    Liz: No.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Lampshaded in the notes for Coffie.
    Xindaris: And note the subtle change of calendar between the first half of the strip and the second. Did these events really take place on a Monday, or did Jon just want to enjoy a little bit of coffie [sic] for once? You Decide.
  • Deep Throat Diet Check offers four explanations for Garfield's behavior in the author's notes.
• Archive Panic: 5100+ strips and counting, with a new comic uploaded daily. Hope you have a lot of time on your hands.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In Subbly Nugmare Garfield, Garfield's head erupts into smoke in the middle panel.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • In a sea of pop culture references, satire, and just plumb absurdity, there's Nostalgiafield, an out-of-nowhere New Media Are Evil-fueled Author Tract. (And tops it all off with the author also mentioning the fetish for crying Garfield they (claim to not) have.) Even for the "anything goes" nature of Square Root of Minus Garfield it really stands out. According to "Garfield Takes a Dip", the author considers it an Old Shame.
  • "It's Just One of Those Days" has Garfield with crazy eyes commenting "OMG WALL P*WN TABLE" as the wall color goes onto the table and into the strip's border. No author's notes are provided.
  • "Return of Mind Screwfield" has aspects of a single Garfield comic flipped around and placed randomly throughout the comic. The transcript simply refers to it as a "bizarre mess." Its distant follow-up, Return of the Son of Mind Screwfield, which distorts a different comic in a similar manner, is just as bizarro.
  • "Fishing trip" features Jon speaking backwards, an inverted image of Woody from Toy Story, Garfield thinking in static, a "666" drawn poorly in red marker, and Product Placement for the author's webcomic.
  • "Untitled.png" is a warped, distorted, miscolored mess that ends with a Burger King advertisement.
  • "gar", which plays out more like a Garfielf video, and ends with Jon questioning "why is the table var(y)ing in height so often". Like strip#155 above, no author's notes are provided.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • "Separation". Jon talks about how he's going to "put the black ones on the end and the white ones on the other" (in the original comic, he's talking about organizing his socks). Cut to a segregated drinking fountain.
  • One Little Letter, in which Garfield and Odie alternate between vibrating rapidly. Jon yells at them to stop sexting each other.
• Discredited Meme:
  • The "Garfield [something that sounds like minus] Garfield" bit after one use too many. It was officially axed when they made a strip with the Terminator going back to stop the meme's creation.
  • Linguistics with Liz has "Enough is Enough, Take Two". Liz is threatened at gunpoint to not deliver the punchline, while the author's notes goes into a long analysis of why the idea behind Linguistics with Liz is uncreative and could be easily done by a computer program.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Hug? Garfield and Jon separately ask to be hugged, but then join and hug each other.
  • This strip removes Odie from Garfield 1993-02-27◊, making Garfield and Arlene kiss each other directly.
  • In Garfield's Ballet Saga, instead of making fun of his male cat for wanting to have a stereotypically feminine hobby, Jon encourages it, even buying Garfield ballet slippers.
  • "Garfield is a cat". After an extended period of complaining about everything stressing him out, Jon tells Garfield that "at least I have you to comfort me." The final panel is them hugging.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This strip became this when the real strip really did have a strip◊ about Garfield chasing a laser pointer two months later.
    • Similarly, this strip features Garfield paying Odie like a hitman to knock the head off a snowman, which became much less absurd when the actual canon◊ featured Garfield doing the same to an unnamed dog to sic Nermal, complete with Make It Look Like an Accident line.
  • The annotation of #88, a recreation of a mezzacotta comic, states "The next trick will be turning Garfield and Jon into Lightning Made Of Owls characters." They don't turn into them, but this comic was made a year later, and then this extremely meta one a few years after that.
  • In this strip, the author points out that, despite his expectations, editing the strip where a mouse declares Jon's house part of "the Empire of Mice" to have the mouse representing various other fictional empires looked like it would never become a meme. The very next day, this was posted. And both author's notes end with a slogan praising the ruler of the empire featured in the strip. (In case you're wondering, the second strip couldn't have been made in response to the first due to the lead time caused by the Strip Buffer).
    • Even better, this contribution was posted a few weeks later, which had been submitted before either of the above.
  • Warning! Challenger Approaching! imagines a fake reveal of Garfield as a Super Smash Bros. Brawl character, a good five and a half years before he became a playable character in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl (which is more or less a Nickelodeon-themed Smash clone; Nick acquired the Garfield franchise two years prior to his inclusion there).
    Manyhills, on the forums: I guess this was inadvertently kind of prescient.
  • In Jon and Lyman #1: How it began, Jon welcomes Lyman to his house, and thinks "but my sandbox is off limits". In Jon and Lyman #7: How it ended, Jon locks Lyman in the basement with his dead cat. The author's notes speculate that "maybe Lyman used his sandbox". Eight years later, in Carnivorous Lyman, Garfield attacks and tries to kill Lyman for having used his sandbox.
• Ho Yay: In this strip, Jon has to yell at Garfield and Odie to stop sexting each other.
• Memetic Mutation: Many strips from the original Garfield have become memes within the SRoMG community and have gotten much more remixes than others.
  • The "Garfield [something that sounds like minus] Garfield" strips typically remix the "The world is constantly changing"◊ strip. The phrase "The world is constantly changing" and the "frozen pudding pops" that are mentioned by Garfield in the strip have also become memes.
  • The "Garfield in 2053" series usually uses the "Milk. Some people read expiration dates. And some don't."◊ strip.
  • Jon gluing a blender to his face◊ is a running gag too.
  • My name is Stephano. I am very rich and macho. Anyone want to chat?◊ (Nobody can empty a chat room like Stephano.)
  • "Changefield" strips use the "We need to make some changes around here!" panel from this strip◊ as well as the "POW!" from this strip◊.
  • Bad mood, coming through (you stepped in my guacamole)◊ is another popular candidate.
  • The Donut Wars usually use this strip◊ where Jon labels a donut with the sign "Jon's Donut" and Garfield eats the donut and adds another sign above the other reading "Garfield ate".
  • I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure, I'll sure...◊
  • "Linguistics With Liz", which takes Liz's gibberish in this comic◊ and replaces it with a different (real or fictional) language (and occasionally changing Garfield's punchline along with it).
  • "Snails are slow," a comic in which Garfield calls a snail slow, to which it replies "you take that back" over three panels. Remixes often make the snail unreasonably fast, such as speaking before Garfield gets there.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Strip 625, which took an Overused Running Gag and effectively terminated it.
  • Strip 2564 has Jon delivering an epic comeback line (even though the author, for some reason, claims that it "makes no sense") to a lover who rejects him, in contrast to the original strip where Jon thinks of the comeback after it's too late.
  • "Yeech!" is a point for point recreation of the cover of the 83rd issue of MAD, this time using memes as the attention grabber instead of sex.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Garfield Minus Cartoon Physics is a positively miserable Deconstruction of cartoon physics, where Garfield doesn't survive the fridge falling on him like the original comic. Jon's reaction is what pushes it into tear jerker territory.
  • Garfield Minus Garfield Plus A Tragic End takes the already depressing aspect of Jon contemplating suicide and makes it worse by having him actually act on it.
  • The End of ''Garfield'' details a hypothetical situation of how Garfield will end: with Jon hanging himself, and Garfield and Odie being unsure of how to deal with it.
  • Cat Destruction is Now Our Slogan shows Garfield's memories of Jon getting increasingly negative thanks to Jon constantly insulting him unprovoked, wanting him gone and later dead, and even inciting physical violence, and explains that Garfield's motive for his laziness and gluttony is to escape Jon.
  • I Made June 19, 2022 Strip Different is a heartbreaking Deconstruction of the June 19, 2022 strip. According to the author, this is what happens "if parents give their kids (and daughters) surprises, only for them to find out that their parents have a dark side for something".
  • And leave us nought but grief and pain for promised joy shows a mouse telling Arlene that Garfield had died of intestinal cancer and that his funeral will be held in a few days. A lonely Arlene sadly says "But I love you so..." to the moon. The author noted that they were feeling "very sick and sad", and created this strip as a result.
  • RIPee, a tribute to Paul Reubens made after his death, involves Garfield sadly looking at Pee-wee's Playhouse, which has gone quiet on the inside.

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