5139: A Reiterating of a Clarification of a Retelling Retold and a Retold Retold Retold of a Retold Retold of a Retelling of Garfield

==Explanation==
Contrary to what the start of the story told by this strip appears to state, U.S. Acres is not a predecessor of Garfield; U.S. Acres debuted in March 1986, nearly eight years after the debut of Garfield and more than ten years after the debut of Garfield's predecessor strip Jon.
==The author writes:==
Inspired by strips #44, #101, #162, #1162, #1163, #1218, and #1219.
Tee-hee meta stuff is silly.
Original strip: .
==Transcript==
Ok, so this is a bit long so let me start at the beginning of the whole thing.
Jim Davis was born in Marion, Indiana on the date of July 28th, 1945. He joined his school's newspaper and became the paper's art editor. This is where he started his cartoonist journey. He had worked on 4 published comics before his creation of Garfield. First was Tumbleweeds, which he assisted Tom Ryans in creating, but was not the main artist of. Davis then made Gnorm Gnat, his first published solo comic. After criticism of it, Davis made the 2 comics Jon and U. S. Acres. Jon is what eventually turned into Garfield, the comic strip you all know and love today.
If you don't actually know about Garfield though, let me explain it to you, it is a comic strip about a cartoonist named Jon Arbuckle and his cat, the eponymous Garfield. Usually it's a silly comic about the interactions between Jon and Garfield, but one fan thought it would be funny to remove the text from all the comics due to the fact that Garfield was commonly retreading old ground or comics being retold or reiterated in slightly different ways that made it repetitive. This edit of the famous strip was shared on the internet as a webcomic. Lemme some of those real quick people might not know about them [sic].
If you don't know what the internet is, it's a method of long term communication made possible by computers, both invented for use to communicate between the military. Eventually computers became public use by the general public for uploading and sharing things to many other people around the globe. This is where webcomics are shared on.
Webcomics are a variation of comics which are published online and shared online specifically. They're based off of regular comics, which I assume I don't have to explain to you.
Anyways that was a bit of a tangent for people who don't know. All of this is to say that Garfield had a spinoff comic which actually also had a spinoff comic called Garfield Minus Garfield These comics completely removed Garfield from the comics and made Jon look like a lonely deranged man. Another group of fans saw this and wanted to one up THOSE people and made Square Root of Minus Garfield, the last webcomic we have to mention here. Keep in mind this is hosted online on a website called mezzacotta which hosts various mostly jokey or user submitted comics.
The webcomic went on and on until strip #44 Garfield Retold was released. The strip consisted of a person confusedly trying to explain a Garfield comic in which the author makes several errors when trying to retell it. This includes leaving out crucial details such as the type of clothes Jon was wearing, the way his hair was styled, his facial expression. All of this combined ended up in a very poor text adaptation of the comic being described.
This all leads to another user satirically breaking down strip #44 in an attempt to make fun of them for poor writing.
User Xyzzy's strip Garfield Retold Retold, #101 on the site, starts by explaining what a comic and webcomic is, which I assume you all know from my descriptions earlier. He talks about the formatting of strip #44, commenting on how the four paragraphs represent the four panels of the Garfield strip that strip #44 describes. The issue here is that the original Garfield strip only had 4 panels, which is one of the many mistakes that Xyzzy makes in his submission. I'll go over these later as they become more relevant later. Xyzzy ends his comic by issuing a challenge to the next person to try and describe HIS comic.
Xyzzy's strip happened to inspire two other people to do something similar to what he did, leading to the joint creation of strips #1162 and #1163, Garfield Retold Retold Retold and Garfield Retold's Retelling Retold. Both of these strips both go through very different methods to describe the same strip in different ways.
But before we can talk about that let me mention another comic real quick, #162, Garfield Retold Minus Garfield, there's not much to talk about here, it's just a spin on Garfield Retold which edits out all mentions and auxiliary actions of Garfield.
Anyways back to the strips inspired by Xyzzy.
Strip #1162 is very much like strip #44 in the way that the author is very confused, however this seems to be a result of strip #101's very poor writing. They stumble upon their words very often and end up describing things already described by either of the previous 2 comics, which is very redundant in my opinion. They try their best to cobble a meaning through James A. Garfield, electricians, and descriptions, but at the end of it all they say that they need to go lie down. It probably wasn't a good idea to try and describe something that confusing, huh.
Strip #1163, contrary to #1162 is a criticism of strip #101. In it, author Henry Morel goes on a tirade about how poorly Xyzzy described strip #44 and about how Xyzzy seems to have never read a Garfield comic in his life. Henry spends an entire paragraph complaining about Xyzzy's statement that regular Garfield strips had 4 panels. Henry then proceeds to comment on Xyzzy's intelligence, which isn't even related to the strip that Xyzzy had produced. He even goes as far as to call Xyzzy stupid. Then, in a hypocritical move, he says it takes Xyzzy until one of the last paragraphs to talk about the actual comic. Ironic considering the fact that outside of his criticism of Xyzzy's analysis of it, Henry never actually describes the aforementioned Garfield comic once. He doesn't even comment on the content of the comic that Xyzzy got incorrectly, only commenting on general Garfield knowledge that Xyzzy got wrong. After his rude and generally very crass criticism of Xyzzy's work, he dares the next person to describe his strip.
After a while another user caught wind of this saga on the website and decided to make his own entry. This time trying to explain everything that had happened in the previous comics along with adding context not before given. This is strip #1218 Garfield Retelling Clarified by user DanielBT.
Daniel goes on about everything I have already mentioned and retold already, but he does leave out parts about the internet, webcomics, and comics in general, which should have been restated for those who didn't know about them. It's very long winded and unnecessarily lengthy though which left me bored about halfway through. I'm not gonna bother describing it in most part due to me having pretty much said all that the strip had already said. Oddly enough though, Daniel leaves out any sort of mention of Garfield Retold Minus Garfield, despite his strip claiming to be an explanation of everything Garfield Retold prior.
Daniel ends his strip with a message to the next person to try and explain everything he just said back to him. Another user then snarkily comments in another strip, strip #1219 Retold Retelling of Garfield Retold's Retelling, "Boy, some people sure love talking about Garfield comics"
The question though is why am I here taking up Daniel on his challenge?? Well, it's a bit of a long story that starts on TVTropes.
For the people out of the loop, TVTropes is a website created to list media and "Tropes" that appear in them. It's a very simple website, usually most pages list a show, comic, videogame, book, whatever and then give a list of associated "Tropes." Anyways, I was visiting this website to read the character page that they gave to the character Nermal from the Garfield series so heavily discussed. I wanted to look at the Nermal page due to him being my favorite character from the series, intrigued to see what TVTropes had to say about him. This eventually led me down to the TVTropes page for Garfield Minus Garfield, a page I found by clicking a link found in the original TVTropes Garfield page. This then naturally led me to the Square Root of Minus Garfield page. I was intrigued so I read the comic and came across the Garfield Retold series of strips. I found this so intriguing I wanted to put my own entry in this legendary series.
So, as said by Xyzzy before me, Henry before me, and Daniel before me.
Describe it.
==Trivia==
*The author initially failed to include 1219: Retold Retelling of Garfield Retold's Retelling among the inspiration Square Root of Minus Garfield strips in the author's notes; this has since been amended to include that strip.
Category:really cool bird
Category:Long titles