On Oct. 23, 1989, Garfield found himself in a home that seemed abandoned, not merely empty. During the week leading up to Halloween, Jim Davis replaced the newspaper strip’s familiar flat 2D layouts with Dutch angles and atmospheric backgrounds. The result barely resembled its everyday surroundings.
Often nicknamed “Alone,” the weeklong sequence turns absence into G-rated horror. Waking with nobody around, Garfield learns that Jon and Odie are missing and that the house seems to have been unoccupied for years. There’s no need for something to leap from the shadows when his entire familiar life appears to be gone.
That ambiguity has prompted readers online to suggest something worse: perhaps Garfield never escapes the deserted house, and every subsequent strip takes place in his delusions. This remains a fan interpretation, not an established explanation of the comic’s continuity. When Davis discussed the story, he described a more straightforward source of fear: solitude.
Polygon argues that the departure hits so hard because Garfield is ordinarily so predictable. In the critic’s description, 99% of the strip delivers daily gags involving an orange cat who overeats, a stupid dog, their odd owner, and recurring subjects such as coffee, laziness, and gluttony. The unusual material occupies the other 1%. These figures convey the critic’s impression, not the results of counting the full archive.
In the October 23 installment, the house is revealed to be empty. The October 24 and October 25 strips, credited to Jim Davis/Paws Inc., undermine any hope that Jon and Odie are simply out for a while. Nobody seems to have occupied the place for a long time, not even Garfield. Have his companions abandoned him years before? Is he a ghost? Has the comic entered a post-apocalyptic alternate universe?
The October 28 strip, credited to Jim Davis/Paws Inc., leaves those questions unresolved and names time as the threat instead: “After years of taking life for granted,” it reads, “Garfield is shaken by a horrifying vision of the inevitable process called ‘time.’ He has only one weapon… denial.”
Garfield panics, then apparently returns to the present alongside Jon and Odie. Rather than firmly explain what happened, the final narration says: “An imagination is a powerful tool,” followed by, “It can tint memories of the past, shade perceptions of the present, or paint a future so vivid that it can entice… or terrify.”
The simplest reading is that it was a nightmare. Polygon also takes the moral to be that you should prize every moment with loved ones, but calls the scenario behind it not widely applicable: you wake in a grim future where none of you exist. The strip then went back to its daily routine, where it has mostly stayed for 37 years.
Davis’s intent and the fans’ interpretation
Davis’s only public account of “Alone” appears to be in the 1998 anniversary collection 20 Years & Still Kicking. His explanation, published nine years after the story ran, presents it as an effort to frighten readers for Halloween, not a declaration that the comic’s reality had secretly changed.
“During a writing session for Halloween, I got the idea for this decidedly different series of strips,” Davis wrote. “I wanted to scare people. And what do people fear most? Why, being alone. We carried out the concept to its logical conclusion and got a lot of responses from readers. Reaction ranged from ‘Right on!’ to ‘This isn’t a trend, is it?’”
For Polygon, there’s something admirable about Davis publishing such an abrupt departure and allowing it to go publicly unexplained for nine years. The critic also places it within a sporadic tendency toward strangeness in his work. Davis has been candid that Garfield began as a commercial undertaking, but that hasn’t prevented him from admitting unusual ideas into it. Typically, those experiments have gone into original graphic novels and similar formats, territory Polygon describes as comparatively “safer.”
The 1984 graphic novel anthology His 9 Lives provides several examples: a detective tale told in prose, a science fiction parody, a chase sequence, and a horror short that Polygon judges surprisingly effective. The animated special Garfield in the Rough ends in a fight between Garfield and a wild panther. As further evidence that the newspaper strip can venture into darkness, Polygon cites the January 21, 1984 installment, credited to Jim Davis/Paws Inc. Despite these earlier examples, “Alone” may still be the newspaper comic’s strangest story in the critic’s view.
The darker fan reading hinges on “denial.” If Garfield relies on that defense, the seeming return of Jon and Odie might represent an illusion, not deliverance. This interpretation puts nearly 40 years of subsequent strips inside the mind of a cat wandering a cold, abandoned home. The conclusion leaves room for that possibility without establishing it as true.
Randall Munroe offers a helpful way to understand the story’s repeated rediscovery. His 2012 xkcd strip “today’s lucky 10,000” suggests that roughly 10,000 people learn a widely familiar fact or idea every day. Common knowledge never means that absolutely everyone knows something, and finding it out later is no personal failing. Social media and microblogging platforms make this process easy to watch as older material reaches people for the first time.
That cycle applies to “Alone”: new sets of readers arrive independently at the same unsettling interpretation. Polygon links the theory’s persistence in part to the internet’s appetite for darker readings of children’s media, predicting that it will endure as long as Garfield itself. In the critic’s assessment, almost 40 years haven’t diminished the way this brief turn toward surreal horror makes Garfield seem like a completely different comic.
Polygon draws a proposed challenge for cartoonists from that contrast: first create a successful children’s comic for 11 years, then spend one week making it as frightening as possible. For the critic, “Alone” demonstrates just how radically an established strip can shift once its ordinary comforts are taken away.
