Sometimes, the lack of Garfield and his thought bubbles leaves panels completely empty, yet somehow, you can still "get it":

It's unsettling, to say the least; was this brilliant streak of voyeuristic schadenfreude always there, hiding beneath the surface of an annoying comic strip? Moreover, why exactly does removing Garfield change the meaning so significantly?

If one stops looking at Garfield as a cat, per se, and instead looks at him as a symbol, it starts to make more sense. Really, if you think about it, Garfield barely resembles a cat. He is more of a logo, a product, a nonsense shape whose meaning derives only from its position in popular culture, as something you can buy. Garfield exists merely as a trinket, another blip in the continual accelerating churn of late capitalism's ravenous hunger for the "new." But these trinkets are merely salves for the underlying horrors of late capitalism: social fragmentation, isolation, anxiety. Remove the product from our lives, and we're left with nothing.

Like the angst-ridden figure in Munch's The Scream, Jon Arbuckle is crying out, with no-one to hear. He is shorn of family, friends, or any social network whatsoever. He wanders his empty apartment, and without a product to focus on (even in irony), he vacillates between manic periods of self-delusion and moments of overwhelming sadness. Sometimes he seems to try and create his own "product": a sock puppet, a grocery sack, even focusing on the ice tray as if its solidifying ice could pass for entertainment.

But none provide satisfaction, none bring the distilled notion of "other" inside, that glint of connectedness in the painted-on eyes of a market-tested logo. Our lives, minus product: laid bare as the pathetic, lonely sagas they've become. Did I mention it's hilarious?

There are new strips up almost every day over at Garfield Minus Garfield. If you're single, you might want to brace yourself before diving in.