Now Give That Chick Some Clothes

If you’ve frequented anime, you know her look: A tiger stripe bikini with matching knee-high boots, long pine green hair, itty-bitty horns and a way with others that is electric in the literal sense because she uses her alien powers to fry people. Don’t worry, she’s not homicidal; she’s just trying to make the earthling idiot Ataru own up to his accidental marriage proposal to her.

Lum, the Invader Girl of Urusei Yatsura is the predecessor of Ranma ½ and Inu Yasha. Isn’t it nutty when a manga artist can’t escape their style even decades later and end up drawing cartoon individuals that look like slightly varied clone version of earlier creations? Kagome is Lum minus sex appeal and green hair. Shampoo is Lum with blue hair. Inu Yasha is Lum minus breasts and green hair. In short, Lum is standing in the three degrees of physical separation or less line with all of Takahashi’s subsequent works.

Rumiko Takahashi is a thriving manga artist in spite of his stock character designs. Three of his series have gone on to spawn hideous merchandise, multiple OVAs and movies that have absolutely nothing to do with the original manga concepts (I’m looking at you Ranma ½ The Movie 2: Nihao my Concubine. Think soft-core porn without sex.) Who could ask for anything more— multiple successes and the ability cash in on them with ease? It’s like being a sexy polygamist married to a batch of rich elderly people who are all near death.

Victory, like a donut, takes many forms. For social reject Jim Davis, that opportunity was a sub-par comic strip followed by a gruesome merchandising orgy.

Allow me to tell you a little story about the man named Jim. Jim began a comic strip called Gnorm Gnat, inspired by his work on Tom K. Ryan’s Tumbleweeds. It sucked and was eventually cancelled. He then created Garfield. It also sucked but due to declining literacy rates in the day, it became successful because as we all know Garfield is a cat of few words. Generations thereafter would be stunned to learn he shared a namesake with the assasinated 20th President of the U.S., spawning the anachronistic out-loud thought: "I didn't know we had a President named after a cat."
Jim then tried his luck again and created U.S. Acres, aka. Orson’s Farm. Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes fame declared it an insult to the intelligence (and that’s a total burn because only desperately foolish people like me read the paper’s comics. No sarcasm intended. Newspaper comic strips were meant to work in sync with various other government schemes as a means of obliterating the middle-class’ ability to ponder anything in depth beyond four panels.) In short, not even stupid people possessed the non-capacity to tolerate the placid stupidity of Orson’s Farm. I hated that egg with legs. Was it supposed to be a euphemism for partially aborted children who survived the procedure and went on to exist as hideously deformed people? (No, that's a little too insightful for ol' Jim.) It was cancelled as a comic strip too. Double burn.

As previously noted, however, he made a killing off of the Garfield frenzy of the 80's and 90's. So not even the great Berkeley Breathed (aka. My God of the funnies) or any other Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist can burry the monolith of idiocracy that is an orange tabby with a severe eating disorder.

In conclusion to all my this and that: Garfield is Lum. He has boobs, occasionally his stripes are tinted green and to somebody out there somewhere (heaven forbid I ever date them), he’s sexy.

There. This entry has no continuity beyond that small 180 I just made in order to square the original threads of my article with my random swerve into a hateful rant towards Jim Davis' creations. I can’t be expected to control my constant digression in the albescence of Ritalin!

Thank you for reading, oh merciful readers.

For your patience, I will leave you with Matthew Sweet’s "I've Been Waiting."
P.S. This is not an AMV. It's an actual music video.

~CMK