Garfield Minus Garfield

In describing a somewhat, uh, mentally unbalanced co-worker to me once, my brother said "She sits in her cubicle and talks to herself the way you talk to yourself when you're in your apartment alone."

Whomever it is that got the brilliant idea to do the blog Garfield Minus Garfield has tapped into that same energy. This is the funniest website I have read in years.

What is Garfield Minus Garfield? It's Garfield panels with the cat photoshopped out, so that Jon, Garfield's owner, is left talking to himself. Sounds like it'd be a little pointless, but from the blog's main page...

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

My favorite one is here.

Garfield is a kid-friendly foray into the imagination. Kids (and the kid in adults) love the idea that a man could have such interactions with his pets (and, for adults, Get Fuzzy has taken this concept to the nth degree)... but when you really THINK about it... I mean, imagine for a second that you're a fly on the wall in Jon Arbuckle's apartment, listening to him talk to "his cat"... not just TALK, but CONVERSE. Anyone who's ever had a pet can relate... still, in many ways, Jon might as well be talking to an empty room.

Meds would be indicated.

Not only has Garfield Minus Garfield become one of the first sites I click on whenever I go online every day; it's also gotten me to-- imagine this-- ACTUALLY READ GARFIELD EVERY DAY IN THE PAPER!!! Garfield has always left me a little limp; I just didn't find it particularly funny. I suppose if I was a cat lover, or maybe, more specifically, a 12-year-old cat lover, I might have enjoyed it... but it's always been on my COMICS TO READ LIST somewhere down between Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G. Since I discovered Garfield Minus Garfield, though, I actually read it in the paper, erasing the cat in my mind's eye, catching up on Jon's battles with mental illness.

I even tried creating a few of my own (posted below). My apologies for the quality; they're crude (I'm not anywhere near as smooth with graphics programs as the owner of the GMG blog is) but they made me laugh.

In my apartment. Alone.

Uh-oh.

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Here are my versions, altered from current Garfield offerings on the Universal Press Syndicate website. Apologies to Jim Davis and to the Garfield Minus Garfield webmaster: