Non Sequitur Scene/Newspaper Comics

• Crankshaft had a week-long series (starting here) that featured a much older Ed Crankshaft living in a nursing home combined with flashbacks to various baseball-related points in his life. Readers speculated that it was another "leap forward" similar to the one that had recently been done in Funky Winkerbean; others wondered if it was the beginning of the strip's conclusion. The next week, everything is back to normal. But what else would you expect in a newspaper comic?
• The infamous, week-long, 1989 Garfield run "Garfield Alone" was a particularly creepy example of this. Garfield wakes up to find himself in an alternate reality where Odie and Jon are nowhere to be seen and he's all alone in a boarded-up, run-down, old uninhabited house, tormented by loneliness.
  • It should be noted that the sequence ends with Garfield seemingly willing himself into believing everything is back to normal, and thus the comic continues as if nothing ever happened. A popular interpretation is that everything that happens after this storyline is the result of Garfield's willful denial of reality, and that we've since been watching the delusions of a cat in an empty house who is slowly starving to death. This individual Non Sequitur moment may have the unintended effect of turning the last 30 years of the comic into Nightmare Fuel.
  • Word of God denied this interpretation.
  • Garfield Minus Garfield then comes along later and turns it on its head...
• Every year around Kwanzaa, the comic strip Curtis runs a two-week-long Story Arc that involves new, made-up characters doing absolutely ridiculous things supposedly based upon African folktales. Past arcs have included a golden, telepathic otter and a magic sandal and bat-winged bears, among others. These often toe the line between Rule of Cool and Mind Screw, and consensus among The Comics Curmudgeon's community is that these are often the strip's crowning moments of awesome.
• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin had always had many bizarre one-off fantasies, but a true BLAM was a continuing story where Calvin slowly got bigger and bigger until he fell off the Earth. Bill Watterson explained in the 10th anniversary book: "My original idea was to do this for a month and see how long readers would put up with it. I wisely chickened out, since the idea wasn't all that interesting to begin with. It's just weird for weirdness's sake, and I don't think it holds up very well."
• Soon after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, The Boondocks dropped its regular cast and storylines in favor of "The Adventures Of Flagee and Ribbon," a pair of talking red, white, and blue patriotism props that provided social commentary measurably less subtle than the strip's standard narrative for a number of weeks before the strip returned to normal.

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