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[Source]

 

 

 

The first of the three Garfield comics in the "alone" series.

 

 Part 1: Childhood

 

As an eight year old, there was one thing that I looked forward to every Sunday, considering that I could not wait for church to end. I would rush into the apartment that I lived in and sit on the couch for a second, to relax. I would then check if my grandmother had bought the Sunday paper (I lived with my grandparents, and I would rather not explain why), if she didn't then I would walk into my room and play my DS, or read, or play with the K'nex set that i had.

However if she DID buy the newspaper, then I would search though the sea of tree pulp to find two things; the first being the crossword puzzle, I utterly loved those, and the second being the Sunday funnies. Being born in the year 2000 made it a bit late for me to love the classics, but oh well.      

I loved the humor of Family Circus and the witty jokes of Pearls Before Swine; but my favourite one was Garfield. I loved how the lasagna-loving cat always made it through what mischief he got himself into, and how he loved catching a few more hours of sleep, dreaming of lasagna. I would never think that there was more behind the life of this happy fat content cat... 

 

Part 2: The Shocking Truth

 

A few days ago, I was bored, surfing YouTube, looking to see if vsause had posted any new videos. I then looked up cartoon theories, such as the Adventure Time one, which did not effect me, or the Smurfs Nazi theory, which I laughed at. I mean come on, little blue men Nazis? they might as well bring in a red Indiana Jones for crying out loud, but the theory made sense. I then found a top 10 creepy cartoon theories, so I decided to take a look. Not many of them surprised me, for I had read better creepypastas about these, except the rugrats theory, which seemed pretty legit, and actually kind of sad.

What shocked me though was that there was a theory on the Garfield comic series, I thought that it would be a cliche theory that it was about a kid who thought he was a cat, or that Jon was imagining it, but this theory really shocked me to the bone. It told of a series 1989 Halloween comic strips that Jim Davis wrote, entitled "Alone".

It begins with our favorite cat waking up and complaining about the cold, and  saying that he is feeling an eerie sensation, saying that where he is isn't his home. He then walks into the hallway calling for Odie and Jon, and he looks all around the house, and realizes that he is alone. His conscience tells him about how he doesn't know how alone he is, and the once happy looking house turns sorrowful and abandoned. Garfield makes up a few reasons why Jon and Odie are gone, and he picks up a picture of the trio, and realizes that his home has been abandoned for years, realizing that he hasn't lived there for years, yet he has.

He then hears something, and sees Jon and Odie in the kitchen, Jon offering breakfast to Garfield. The food and Jon disappear as he was handing it to him, leaving the poor cat in the abandoned house alone again. Garfield sees his life is a lie, that he is slowly going insane from starvation, and that Odie and Jon have either left or died, leaving him trapped in the foreclosed house with no one. He uses the only mental weapon that he has left.....denial, he denies that his life is a lie, and he hallucinates about his happy "life", ending the comic with a moral.

This comic tells us a number of things that I have managed to put together. The abandoned house and the absence of people is how we would view Garfield's life through our eyes, not unlike that of the Pyro from Team Fortress 2. Inside Garfield's mind however, he is dreaming up his past life, reliving old memories to keep the loneliness away, like how the Pyro thinks that the world is just a big candy-land. It also tells us that the whole comic series is a lie, that Garfield has been making it all up all along, re-acting his past life and adventures so he doesn't have to face the truth. He has slowly gone insane from hunger and loneliness that he temporarily sees reality as it is, the truth too devastating that he seals himself back into his fantasy life, and that as he dies, that his eyes close for the final time, seeing that his owner has left him to die...but who knows? Maybe, just maybe, Garfield will open his eyes and see the real Jon and Odie by his side, ready to help him live his "happy" life. Go on, research this..the comic exists. 

 

 

And it is right here..

Spoiler

 

 

Right away, there is something very off with this strip, if only because it was, to my knowledge, the first time Davis had used that “to be continued” interstitial, and probably the first time there hadn’t even been an attempt at a joke. That, of course, would emerge as the regular pattern for Garfield as the strips went on, but for now, things were starting off pretty ominous.

On Tuesday, October 24, things got worse.

 

 

It’s not often that you hear folks in comics — even in newspaper strips — talk about Jim Davis as a craftsman, but the simple act of throwing a Dutch angle into that first panel is remarkably unsettling. Keep in mind that Garfield had been at large (ha ha!) for over a decade at this point, with ten solid years of the same kind of straightforward, level panels. Everything was built around Jon’s curiously chest-high counter/table thing — seriously, does that dude live in Gears of War? — and with the exception of the occasional strip in front of the living room window, those tight shots are Garfield‘s entire world. Something as simple as skewing the panel makes everything feel off, especially when you’re encountering it on a page full of those rigid, three-panel strips, Garfield scissors in hand, ready to cut it out and add it to the manilla folder.

It’s that last panel that does it, though. As heavy-handed as the narration might be — another first for the strip, I think — that shot of Garfield staring endlessly at the reader witih the simple thought “I’M ALONE” is chilling. What got me about it at seven was that it was Garfield staring at me while expressing my worst fear, but looking back on it now, what sticks out is that there’s no punctuation. No period. No exclamation point. A blunt statement of fact with no emotion, but carrying a heavy implication: I’m Alone

On Wednesday, October 25, panic sets in.

 

 

At this point, I remember not wanting to cut this one out, but even back then I had the completist streak that you get from a lot of people who end up obsessing over comic books.

Once again, we can see that Davis is experimenting with angles in the first panel, but what grabs me about this is the color. Whoever did the coloring for the digital version did a pretty great job and that sickly olive green sky in the last panel is a pretty great touch, but in 1989, the strip ran in black and white. The silhouettes ands shadows in the first two panels, the walls closing in on Garfield and the darkness falling across his outstretched hands are appropriately haunting touches.

Again, though, it’s panel three that does it — the house isn’t just abandoned, it’s dilapidated. It’s boarded up like there are zombies roaming around, and even the For Sale sign jutting up from the overgrown lawn — a lawn also producing a skeletal tree stretching up into that bile-colored sky –has been there long enough that it’s starting to rot away. Garfield isn’t just alone, he’s alone in a place that’s been abandoned for a long, long time.

On Thursday, October 26, Garfield suspects he may be dead.

 

 

Honestly, the weakest of the bunch, but at this point that’s kind of a relief. It’s a little too overdramatic, even if Garfield’s realization that he is at best in a place that is Wrong and at worst actually dead is a pretty weird thing to see right under the Junior Jumble. The best thing about it is the opening sentence, “My home has been abandoned,” which tells an entire story in five simple words.

On Friday, October 27, false hope is destroyed.

 

 

Like I said, I’m not a huge fan of Davis as a storyteller, but you have to hand it to the man: He knows how to mess with his audience. If you were in the habit of reading the newspaper on a weekday — like, say, if you picked it up on the way to work but didn’t get it at home on the weekends — then you might expect Friday’s strip to be where it all wrapped up. It doesn’t. Instead, there’s a false ending, a brief glimpse of happiness that’s revealed to be a hallucination, leaving Garfield alone in the kitchen, arms outstretched for a bowl that’s never coming.

Two things worth noting here: First, Jon’s robotic “Hello, Garfield. Have some food” is similarly un-punctuated, like Garfield’s “I’m Alone”, which feels like a callback to the disturbing feel of the second strip, setting up the knife twist of the third panel. Second, Davis is leveling a pretty harsh criticism at his own creation — Garfield’s reaching for food, not companionship, something that’s going to come back in the final act. The moment he touches it, he’s pulled out of the hallucination and into a rotting world with a mocking, un-punctuated caption. He has chosen material goods over people, and is damned because of it.

On Saturday, October 28, Garfield gave in to madness.

 

 

This messed me up.

As much as that last caption might point to a Dickensian moral about how the previous week of strips was what may be and not what will be, it’s the earlier strip that changes everything about the strip. The last resort of the sweaty, spiraling eye in the first panel, buckling under the weight of the realization that the progress of time is inevitable and will wear down all that you love and hate, that everything you know is ultimately insignificant, isn’t “friendship” or “companionship” or even “love,” that nebulous force that people always turn to when they get desperate.

It’s denial.

Garfield, already hallucinating, refuses to accept what he is seeing. He rejects it, this sudden twisted reality that he’s found himself in, and in that denial, he gets his family back, and then settles right back into his old ways as though nothing has happened. There’s no change, no Ebeneezer Scrooge moment of treating Odie better or being nicer to Jon, no matter what that final panel might indicate. He just keeps going, acting as though everything is the same as it always was.

But it’s not. Garfield has seen — we have seen — another version of his reality, one where he’s alone in a long-abandoned house, where Jon and Odie and bright colors and food are just fading visions, hallucinations that fade at the slightest lapse in concentration, a reality that is only replaced by the act of forcing yourself to deny that it’s the truth. That is what we have been shown, and while the strip goes on, you’re left with all the questions that Garfield has refused to answer. What is real? Is it the world of comfort and safety that we want to believe in, or is believing in it an act of denial for ourselves? Has the world around us become so wretched that we retreat into the safety of our minds? Are we — am I — alone and abandoned, isolated in a world that creeps in around the edges of what I know unless I force myself not to see it?

These are not questions I was prepared to answer at seven years old. All I know is that this was the last strip I cut out, and I later sold those scissors at a yard sale to a woman in a Garfield sweatshirt and Garfield sweatpants who tried to talk me down from 50 cents to a quarter.

 

[Violett]

Are you on drugs?

[Source]

Are you on drugs?

That is beside the matter 

[Imperato]

Garfield got fucked up and now he's just stoned and imagining stuff. DW, he's fine.

[mdeathpriest]

the stoned garfield lollz

[shinegar]

Cool comics dude.

I like them.

[k4mk4ok4o]

are you on drugs?

[madocac1]

?