Garfield Minus Garfield Tops It's Own Metaphysical Despair

As one who grew up read­ing every­thing Jon Davis penned, and then pro­ceeded (later in life) to read much of the likes of Hei­deg­ger, Kierkegaard, and Niet­zsche, i have a supreme appre­ci­a­tion of the “web­comic” Garfield Minus Garfield. G-G is real easy to sum up: Take an old Garfield comic strip, remove any appear­ance of any char­ac­ter besides the inim­itable Jon Arbuckle, and watch as exis­ten­tial hilar­ity ensues!

The con­cept is so sim­ple (and pla­gia­ris­tic). Yet, some­thing hap­pens when we iso­lates Jon’s des­per­ate life from its nor­mally comedic sur­round­ings… The blank pan­els, where acer­bic quip­ping once was, serves to cre­ate a sense of tim­ing in the strips that under­score the absur­dity, and despair of Jon’s already lonely life.

I am just con­tin­u­ally amazed at how MANY old Garfield strips can be repur­posed into soul-crushing por­traits of human suffering.