The Darker Side of Garfield
When I was younger, I consumed comics of all sort with rabid abandon. While I loved my Marvel and DC, I also spent a lot of time with lighter stuff – I was obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes, Far Side, and even enjoyed Garfield. Something had bothered me when I was reading Garfield that I had long since forgotten, something that put me off the banal hijinks of the fat orange cat.
Recently I stumbled (tumbled?) across a Tumblr post that referenced some Garfield strips that depicted him as alone, starving in an abandoned house, having hallucinated Jon and Odie and their various shenanigans in a post-apocalyptic world in which he doesn’t exist.. Its disturbing stuff:
The author, Jim Davis, later clarified that he meant to do something that was legitimately scary – and I’d say for a kid’s cartoon strip it was a job well done. I wondered if it was these non-canon strips that had disturbed me, but I decided to keep digging.
Further investigations took me back to Jim Davis’ doorstep. In his book Garfield, His 9 Lives Jim Davis brings in a variety of guest authors and artists to tell a series of stories featuring Garfield throughout the ages, through his 9 lives. While I can appreciate the objective, many of these interpretations of Garfield fall far from the source material.
Davis opens the book by describing a scenario where God himself is instructing a team in the creation of creatures – specifically, cats. When met with protestations over giving them 9 lives, God insinuates that he himself is orange and feline, and that Garfield is his Avatar… and it only gets weirder from there.
Seriously. I’m not making this up.
Even Family Guy had something to say on the topic:
Seriously! This is kid’s material.
Still - I found it. The weirdness I had read over 20 years ago that so unsettled me it turned me off from the franchise completely. It is hard to understand why such choices were made, but apparently, it was enough to get it turned into a made-for-TV movie that is only slightly less bizarre.
This idea of Garfield as God/an avatar of God/some sort of eternal being is an interesting one. As Inside A Mind points out in their video explaining lasagnacat, the PAWS INC site speaks extremely highly of themselves. Inside A Mind theorizes this in some part inspired the YouTube channel lasagnacat, a group that over the life of their channel racked up nearly 20,000,00 views.
Side note: PAWS INC has since changed their copy on their About section. Interesting…
While most of the lasagnacat videos seem to be simple recreations of comic strips…some venture in to decidedly more bizarre, satirical lands. Take this one, titled 07/27/1978, which spends nearly an hour breaking down the greater metaphysical and philosophical implications of a single comic strip:
Lasagnacat’s most bizarre stunt resulted in a 4 hour long video in which either Garfield, Jon or Odie answer the door to recordings of people stating the number of sexual partners they’d had. Apparently, they hosted a voicemail where hundreds of people called in for this. Which is weird enough, on its own…but if you manage to make it to the last 7 minutes, things take a completely dark, strange and decidedly NSFW turn.
Is Garfield an eternal entity? Is Jon doomed to repeat his cycle? Or is this really a 4-hour video with a 5-word punchline: “Jim Davis, you aren’t funny”. Whatever their ultimate motivation, lasagnacat has put forth a remarkable amount of surprisingly high quality content.
While obvious connections are dubious, a series of dark, horror inspired, and often Lovecraftian themed fan depictions of Garfield have sprung up in the last decade or so.
Some are tame, such as the existential Garfield minus Garfield which is not so much ‘dark’ as it is despondent and introspective. Seeing the strips with Garfield removed really speaks tonally to the bizarre work of lasagnacat.
There’s a few comics featuring Zalgo, an internet meme that’s just plain creepy
More recently, the comic ‘Hungry’ by Dubblebaby in which Garfield gets so Hungry he eats the whole house (referenced in Forbes’ article Garfield's Descent Into Madness Takes Root On Reddit)
And then there was artist Will Burke, who goes by AnActualSkeleton on Reddit and regularly posts on Instagram as well as Redbubble, who came up with this masterpiece that has gone on to inspire an ENTIRE SUBREDDIT, called ImSorryJon, which currently has over 200k subscribers (!!)
On a personal note, I’m obsessed with Lovecraftian and Cosmic horror in general, so this just ticks ALL my boxes – Nice stuff, Will!
From there, things seem to have really exploded. Creepy pics of Garfield are popping up all over the internet, and I could not be happier about it. The most recent piece of nightmarish mastery has been ‘Garfield Gameboy’d’, recently featured on Kotaku.
This comes courtesy of artist Lumpy Touch. Check out the full vid below.
All told, the weird, dark and not-so-orange underbelly of the world of Garfield worship is a decidedly unexpected take on a tedious childhood comic hero. I never thought it would make my bucket list, but I would love to sit down with Jim Davis and see what he thinks about the cult following Our Dark Lord has inspired.
Want more weird unique content? Just search below:
