37 Years Ago, ‘Garfield’ Suddenly Changed Genres With a Mind-Blowing Comic Strip – Polygon.com: Polygon reports that for one week, Oct. 23–28, 1989, Jim Davis’s Garfield ran a six-strip arc nicknamed “Alone” that turned the gag strip into moody, G-rated horror.
The series opens with Garfield waking to an empty, decayed house and spending several strips confronting the possibility that Jon and Odie are gone and that he — and the home — have been abandoned for years.
The Oct. 28 panel closes with the narrator: “After years of taking life for granted, Garfield is shaken by a horrifying vision of the inevitable process called ‘time.’ He has only one weapon… denial,” language Polygon reproduces from the strips.
Polygon places the arc in context by noting Jim Davis has occasionally let “high weirdness” into Garfield, pointing to the 1984 graphic anthology His 9 Lives as another example of unusual, non-gag material in the creator’s work.
Readers have recycled and reinterpreted the “Alone” arc online for decades; Polygon quotes Davis’s later remark that the storyline was written because he “wanted to scare people,” and the piece says the strip then returned to its usual routine after that week.
Fans who want a broader look at newspaper comics or similar offbeat moments can read roundups like 20 Best Comic Strips or related features such as Gary Larson ranking, which place unusual single-strip stunts in a longer comics history.
Why the arc still circulates: Polygon argues the sequence’s art — moody backgrounds and Dutch angles — plus the final narrator line invite darker readings, like the idea that every later Garfield strip might be part of the cat’s ongoing delusion.
Polygon reproduces panels and dates from the run and summarizes reader reaction then and now; it also reports Davis referenced the strip in the 1998 anniversary collection 20 Years & Still Kicking, saying he wanted to scare readers with the Halloween-week experiment.
For many fans the arc is a rare, self-contained experiment: the strip ran Oct. 23–28, 1989, presented as a brief narrative detour, then reverted to its standard gag-a-day format, according to Polygon.
Sources
- Polygon — dates, reproduced panel text, Jim Davis quote and context for the Oct. 23–28, 1989 “Alone” arc.
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