Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a 60-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next.
“He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,” one editor argued.
The debate has spilled into the broader Internet, where a Heat Street writer complained of “cultural marxists” bent on “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination.”
It all started with a comment Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, made two years ago in an interview with Mental Floss — titled innocuously: “20 Things You Might Not Know About Garfield.”
