Garfield Minus Garfield and Related Surrealism

I've been hip to the whole "minus Garfield" phenomenon for some time now, but every time I come back to it I find a new wealth of humor and resonant comedy. And I'm being serious.

The deal is that Garfield (the comic strip) can be immensely improved by removing the titular character (Garfield himself) entirely. As far as I know, the whole thing began a couple of years ago, on the goofy message board Truth and Beauty Bombs, where an idea proposed by MackJ spiralled into a netwide phenomenon.

Mack proposed that removing Garfield's often-redundant dialogue would improve the strip, and by gum he was right. The strip took an odd, surreal tone that made it much more readable:


But with Garfield acting as the straight man to Jon's depressed madness the strip still didn't have the schadenfreude, the madness, the isolation that it needed to become truly great. Later in the thread, people got the idea to remove Garfield entirely, and the idea took off.

Earlier this year, GarfieldMinusGarfield.net was born, and achieved a modest level of success. The idea is hardly original at this point, and some of the strips featured on the site are direct copies from early samples on the TruthAndBeautyBombs thread, but it's such a convenient place to read Minus Garfield strips that I still feel inclined to celebrate it. If these examples don't compel you to check out the site's archives, feel free to read more of my cynical political ramblings.