Garfield Minus Garfield

From a funny comic to a depressing and psychedelic experience in one eraser move.

I'm not crazy, I promise... someone deleted Garfield.

—Jon Arbuckle commenting on the webcomic

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 and depression in a quiet American suburb.

—The original summary for the webcomic

In a World where Garfield never existed, one man imagines that he does.

Garfield Minus Garfield is a strip adapted by Dan Walsh from selected Garfield strips. In this edited version, Jon is the only main character; all other main or non-essential cast (and their associated dialogue) have been removed. However, Jon still behaves as though they, most often Garfield, were there.

Garfield Minus Garfield has been published in a book, which contains the original strips alongside their "Minused" versions, as well as a foreword by Garfield creator Jim Davis (who not only openly approved of the concept, but made several GMG strips for the book).

Other people have made edits to Garfield strips, these edits including, but not limited to: the removal of all thought balloons; and Realfield, which replaces Garfield with a photo-realistic cat drawing.

Tropes used in Garfield Minus Garfield include:

• Adaptation Distillation: By removing the polarizing main character, Jim Davis' work is now a masterpiece of existential angst.
• Animated Adaptation: Someone took the Garfield Thanksgiving special and edited it into this.
  • Before that, he made An Arbuckle Christmas. There's also a version of the Christmas video that incorporates the discharge sequence from Lost, but it's nowhere to be found on the internet.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The point of the comic is to show how sad, pathetic, and most likely psychotic Jon appears if he is just viewed a little differently.
  • For example
• Beat Panel: With Garfield gone, a lot of panels are left empty, or at the very least include no action or dialogue. This works surprisingly well. A variation of this involves a single panel of Jon doing something zany or eccentric, surrounded by two empty panels. Oddly enough, the empty panels make it funnier.
• Captain Obvious: In this strip. Happens a lot given that Jon is no longer actually speaking to anyone.
• Crapsack Life
• Christmas Special
• Dada Comics: If only the original Dadaist were around today -- they would surely dig the starker strips.
• A Date with Rosie Palms: Some of the strips have Jon staring at his crotch, then suddenly deciding to leave.
  • Some are just better for it.
  • Others come across as euphemism.
  • And then we get things like this.
  • Disturbing on so many levels...
  • All in the third panel.
  • "Practice" you say?
  • Those steam lines aren't coming from the water.
• Deconstruction: The series as a whole is a deconstruction of its source material. Seeing as though Word of God apparently stated that Garfield never talked in the comic, both that and this show just how much of a wreck Jon really is.
• Don't Explain the Joke: The comic's humor often comes from getting rid of Garfield's commentary on Jon's pathetic life and eccentric behavior. This makes the strip funnier, because Jon is already funny without Garfield's observations.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin
• Follow the Leader: Series Minus Series Core.
• Genre Shift: It's amazing how deleting the titular character from the strip immediately changes a comedy into a commentary of one man's losing battle with isolation and depression in suburban America.
• Minimalist Cast: Jon is literally the only character, with Garfield, Odie and Liz removed. Other minor characters appear occasionally, however.
• Mood Swinger: Jon. And how!
• Parody Assistance: Jim Davis not only approved of GMG, but has even produced several new strips himself.
• Remix Comic
• Sanity Slippage: Some of the comics in the video compilation linked in the YMMV tab show that Jon is slowly going mad. Examples include smushing ice cream cones into his face, dressing up for a date... that's in three weeks, jumping in the streets dressed as a pink clown, chasing cars in the manner of dogs, breaking down sobbing at the most random times, Madness Speak, and, finally, being sent to a Mental Hospital.
• Shout-Out: In Pearls Before Swine here and here.
• Take That: Some of the more...high-brow comics aficionados out there initially (and approvingly) viewed the strip as being this to Jim Davis, who often gets dismissed as "uncouth" and as a sell-out in such circles. Then, the author clarified that he loves the original comics, which made said aficionados shut up for the most part.
  • Jim Davis himself incidentally loves these remakes enough to have allowed them to be printed in a book form.