The Infinite Sadness of the Orange Garfield Suit Auction

An item recently went up for auction that roughly 99.9999999999999999 percent of the public could not care less about but that I found utterly fascinating, melancholy and also hilarious. 

That’s because I fell into the Facebook bad comic strip underworld in a big way a few years back and one of the figures it’s most morbidly fascinated by is Nathen Mazri, the eccentric and flamboyant co-founder and public face of Garfield Eats.

Garfield Eats is of course the legendary cult business that gave overjoyed fans of branding an opportunity to live out their dreams by consuming a pizza shaped like the head of everyone’s favorite Monday-hating, lasagna-loving feline. 

It was a beautiful, beautiful dream too pure for our corrupt world, particularly since Mazri’s overwhelming focus seemed to be on becoming Kardashian-level famous. 

Mazri aggressively nudged Garfield, one of the most famous and popular characters in the world, to the side so that GarfieldEats’ branding could focus monomaniacally on the person he was convinced the world really wanted to know, love and worship: himself. 

To that end, Mazri perversely and counter-productively made Garfield Eats all about himself and his poignantly unhinged lust for fame and attention. He might as well have re-titled it MazriEats and sold pizzas in the shape of his own head. 

Mazri’s smirk figured prominently in GarfieldEats’ advertising and branding. The cornerstone of Mazri’s wildly unsuccessful brand-meld with Jim Davis’ endlessly lucrative creation was a tailored suit the EXACT color of Garfield that Mazri wears.

The GarfieldEats co-founder DESPERATELY wanted everything that he did at the company to be iconic in the same way early iPods are iconic. The Garfield suit was supposed to be the single most iconic item associated with GarfieldEats and Mazri.

By putting on his famous Garfield suit, Mazri was able to become Garfield on some strange existential level, to harness his lazy swagger and belligerent bravado. In one of the many poignantly pathetic moments in the reality show pilot Mazri had made around GarfieldEats involved the co-founder getting emotional as he talks about an autistic boy who became obsessed with him and insisted that his mother travel hours so that he could eat a pizza shaped like Garfield’s head and see Mazri in his orange Garfield Suit. 

Mazri is so obsessed with the orange Garfield suit that when he launched Nathfield, an ostensibly comic podcast about an anthropomorphic cat who is a cross between himself, Garfield, Jesus and Superman (seriously), he had the title character get his superpowers specifically from the orange suit. 

So I was amused but not terribly surprised when someone in one of my bad comic strip Facebook groups posted a link to a site where Mazri was selling four Garfield items, including the orange Garfield suit. 

I understand why Mazri might want to part with what he clearly hoped would an item of clothing every bit as iconic as Michael Jackson’s white glove. 

GarfieldEats was a spectacular public failure. Mazri wanted to be famous. He became infamous. He wanted people to admire him. Instead they laughed at him. Mazri thought that Garfield would be his ticket to fame and fortune, to the life he wanted to lead and the person he wanted to be. Instead his business was a failure and then reasonable souls revoked his license to make pizza shaped like Garfield’s head. 

That has to suck. That has to REALLY suck. And it had to put Mazri in an uncomfortable place because he had built his brand and his image around a character whose owners had very publicly dumped him. 

Break ups are painful. The more public they are, the more it hurts and Mazri made sure to make everything in his life and his career as public as possible. 

I know that when I got dumped, or fired, or had a column cancelled I took it personally. It hurt. I’d love to be able to say that I took rejection in stride and didn’t let it get to me but the opposite is true: I take things very personally, in a way that’s not healthy or productive but is human. 

Part of Mazri’s mourning process for the death of GarfieldEats involves selling its signature item of clothing. It’s a way of dramatically establishing that Mazri has moved on from GarfieldEats even as its failure continues to haunt him. 

I thought briefly about buying the famous orange Garfield suit for my Museum of Terrible Comic Strip Ephemera but then realized that I do not operate a Museum of Terrible Comic Strip Ephemera. 

It ain’t over until the narcissist sells his signature orange Garfield suit as yet another dramatic gesture, which means, sadly but also hilariously, that the dream of GarfieldEats is now officially dead. 

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