Groovitude: a Get Fuzzy Treasury

Reviewed: January 31, 2003
By: Darby Conley
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
255 pages, $22.95

Get Fuzzy is a very funny syndicated cartoon strip about a dog, a cat and their human. Doesn’t sound funny that way does it?

Well, the dog is a shar-pei-yellow lab cross, the cat is a very twisted Siamese with permanently laid back ears, and the human is a fellow named Rob who works for an advertising agency.

Still not funny? Okay, the dog is naively innocent, very polite and maybe a few cards short of a full deck. The cat is a bundle of attitude with delusions of grandeur. Rob is a relatively normal fellow who has to deal with the fact that he lives with two talking animals.

Getting better, right?

Conley says his inspiration was Larson’s The Far Side, but I’m betting it was more like Wattersons’s Calvin and Hobbes filtered through Breathed’s Bloom County, which in turn owed a bit of a debt to Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

At any rate, the end result is very funny. How funny? Well, let me put it this way. Cartoon collections generally end up in one of the call of nature closets in our house, and while this one was in circulation I had to keep telling my wife to “put the book down and come to supper.” I rarely ever have to do that; it’s usually the other way around.

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