Garfield Rounds Out

(His 16th Book)

by
Jim Davis

Ballantine, October 1988, 126 pp.
ISBN: 0-345-35388-9

Genre: Comics
Subgenre: Comic Strip / Humor
Reviewed: 6/28/2010

Reviewed by: Conan Tigard

Book Cover

Comic Page

Synopsis

Garfield Rounds Out is the sixteenth collection of Garfield comic strips. All of the comic strips appear in black and white. The first page contains Garfield's Scale of Intelligence while the last page of the book displays the Garfield Workout. This book contains comic strips from 5/18/1987 through 12/19/1987. Most of the strips are single shots, but a few storylines appears.

This collection contains the following storylines: Let's Go Fishing, Splut Week, Honest Ed's Used Cars, and Coffee.

Garfield became very popular in the late-1970s and continues on today, although the character now looks a little different. It is seen daily in thousands of newspapers and enjoyed by millions worldwide. Garfield is a quirky cat that is quite fat, lazy and loves his lasagna. He loves to pick on Odie, the dog, and give Jon, his owner, a hard time. He hates diets and loves food . . . any type of food, especially lasagna.

Review

Garfield Rounds Out is another full book of comic strips about that zany, fat cat Garfield. With the comedic help of Jon and Odie, Garfield goes through life tormenting his friends and making readers smile. He does have his moments when he is a nice little kitty, but they are far and few between.

I was a little disappointed with this book. There were not very many storylines and only a couple of the single shot comic strips made me chuckle. I like a good long storyline with a continued theme, which I find to be very entertaining. Maybe Jim Davis just couldn't think of anything interesting for Garfield to do over a couple of week for this time period. With only four storylines, I found myself wanting a lot more.

With the lack of storylines, this book is mostly filled with single shot daily comics. While these can usually be quite funny, I found something to be missing here. Sure, some of the strips made me laugh a little, but most of them did not. Are they entertaining? Sure. But they didn't make me laugh out loud, which is what I wanted to happen.

Overall, Garfield Rounds Out is is a decent collection of Garfield comic strips. Well, the good news is that there are a ton of other Garfield books out there that you can read instead. Garfield books are everywhere!