Garfield: Dead?

This freaked me right the fuck out when I read it. I used to adore Garfield in the early 1980s, and collected all the books — little brightly colored books in comic strip aspect ratio. But I began to realize that the strip just repeated the same things over and over again, every single week: Garfield sleeps, eats lasagna, torments Odie, torments Jon, wash, rinse, repeat. I had stopped reading Garfield by the time this particular strip ran. It sure puts the entire series into a new, creepy light.

From The Onion A/V Club’s 12 Memorable Newspaper Comic Strip Deaths

Of course, some people claim that Garfield himself died back in the late 1980s, when the strip ran an eerie, inexplicable weeklong storyline in which Garfield wakes up to the realization that his home is an abandoned, disintegrating part of a barren landscape. Running from room to room in a panic, he realizes he’s alone. (Weird inset narration panel: “You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield.”) Briefly, he encounters Jon and Odie, and reaches to accept the food Jon offers, but the entire thing turns out to be a mirage. The weird narration continues, over creepy images of a sweaty, squinting eye and a screaming Garfield: “Locked fast within a time when he no longer exists, Garfield grapples with his greatest fear… loneliness. He has only one weapon… denial.” Whereupon Jon and Odie reappear, and the storyline abruptly ends with some blather about the power of imagination. Some fans have suggested that this all means Garfield is either dead, or dying of hunger in an abandoned house, and that the rest of the strip is his fevered attempt to imagine a better life for himself. Doesn’t that make the strip’s saccharine repetitions a lot more interesting?