Ruin Your Childhood //Completed//

Garfield

Garfield, the over-fed, pampered cat is actually a starving stray. His life of comfort and over-indulgence is the product of his simple, and aversive animal night. His body is able to survive the harsh winter nights in the open alleys because his mind denies this fact and instead tells him he's in a warm cat-bed. He survives the crippling hunger-pains of not eating for several days because his brain tells him that they're pains form eating too much lasagna.

Garfield in reality may even be regularly abused by humans and chased by dogs, thusly why in his delusions he's mentally superior to both the human and the canine he knows. He's already coping in the survival part of the brain, why not cope in the sociological one?

Anyways, theory goes that Garfield is in a family with Jon and Odie, and has interactions with all the other characters. However, this is all within his mind, as he suddenly wakes up from the nightmare one day, to find the real world a cold, desolate, and abandoned place. Where he once found food, he now finds nothing, and his warmth and shelter are completely devoid, as if the world has suddenly died.

Garfield cannot comprehend this, and begins hallucinating. Since then, all of the strips of Garfield have been created by his twisted imagination as he slowly starves to death in his abandoned house.

These theories are based on a Halloween short run in 1989.

“During a writing session that week, I got the idea for this decidedly different series of strips.Jim Davis is reported to have actually “laughed loudly” when informed of these rumors circulating on the Internet. In Garfield’s Twentieth Anniversary Collection, in which the strips are reprinted, Jim Davis discusses the genesis for this series of strips. His caption, in its entirety states:

I wanted to scare people. And what do people fear? Why, being alone of course. We carried out the concept to its logical conclusion and got a lot of responses from readers. Reaction ranged from 'Right on!' to 'This isn't a trend is it?'”"