Garfield ‘died’ in 1989

Thank you to USA Today’s Pop Candy for this one …

Garfield, to me, has been one of the most saccharine, non-threatening comic strips ever for years … that is, I used to think that until I ran across a week’s worth of Garfield strips from the late 1980s. This is by no means new; as a matter of fact, it circulated on Web sites just last year. But, hey, it’s new to me.

Here’s a link that shows all of the strips, which have Garfield waking up to an empty house that’s been boarded up for years. Garfield faces loneliness, the scariest thing of all, before John and Odie finally appear to him … followed by some weird paragraph about how powerful the imagination can be.
Strange stuff.

I am pasting the following from boingboing.net, which offers Jim Davis’ (the comic’s creator) explanation of those strips.
The article states: “‘Garfield is NOT dead, nor is he starving to death,’ Jim said … It was simply a week before Halloween and Jim wanted to do something legitimately scary, as opposed to Halloween-scary. Ghosts aren’t scary… being alone or dying alone (is). Just that simple.”

It makes me want to go back and find hidden meanings in the other Garfield strips … and what about Garfield and Friends?