For years I’ve been telling people (people who promptly lost all respect for me) that there was a certain brilliance to the comic strip “Garfield.” I think this (entirely accidental) brilliance stems from the fact that the strip was conceived as a merchandising vehicle. Eventually, the mental toll of writing a daily comic strip about a cat sitting around an apartment started to become really apparent… to me anyway.

Is John insane for talking to his cat? Is Jim Davis being driven insane by the task of drawing a guy talking to a cat for 20-something years?

As you can see, I have a really hard time explaining this idea to people. Every time I try, everyone looks at me like I’m on crack. I tried to find examples of what I was talking about and failed.
Awhile back, I found a thread where people were photoshopping Garfield’s dialog out of the strip- transforming it from the usual corny comic, into an absurdist strip about a weirdo who talks to his cat.

This was closer to what I was talking about but not quite…. Now some wonderful soul has completely removed Garfield and Odie from the comic, leaving a very obviously mentally-ill John Arbuckle talking to himself in his apartment. Thank you, thank you, whoever you are. This is what I was talking about.

Garfield without Garfield is brilliant.