((Excerpted from Livejournal, 01/09/2005. Hyperlinks removed.))

I love scrambled eggs
Especially on chilly mornings
When my feet get cold.

This was the punchline of something like strip #3 for Garfield, and it's the one that sticks with me, more than 20 years later. It's one syllable away from a haiku, and while there were many funny strips after it, none of them stick in my memory like this one. It is the quintessential Garfield punchline, and Jim Davis, at least for me, never reattained that zen-like level of funny. Nonetheless, I read Garfield for years and years, hoping he'd once again sieze perfection.

He never did.

There's something very sad about a cartoon that gets it right at first, then slowly ossifies into something dull. Garfield became popular, then wildly popular, then sort of faded into That Comic That Other People Must Like. Was Garfield original? No. Jim Davis owed much to the brilliant cartooning of B. "Hap" Kliban and George Gately, his predecessors by more than ten years.

So perhaps it's just as well that a few days ago Garfield was dropped by the L.A. Times to make room for a new comic strip, "Brevity".

Mind you, this is hardly the end for Garfield. He's still huge. Like Fred Basset and Hagar the Horrible before him, I expect the strip will continue for many years, possibly even surviving Jim Davis himself. But perhaps... perhaps it might serve as a wake-up call. Nothing lasts forever, and certainly not success.