Garfield (Comic Strip)/Fridge

Fridge Horror
""You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield""
 * Garfield might actually be starving to death in an abandoned house.
 * If you think about it, the house Garfield is trapped in has been abandoned for years, which suggests that Garfield is ALREADY DEAD and his spirit is bound to the place, a strong sense of denial is the only reason he doesn't scream.


 * It actually gets much worse if one reads the article in the present time and imagines the year as such while reading it. Garfield is very big on marking the eponymous cat's birthday, and how old he's getting--his birth year is stated as 1978(the year of the comic's inception)--and by the late 80's, the age jokes were starting to be laid on pretty thick at birthday time. The strips were written in 1989..a cat born in 1978 would be pretty damn old by then--and when you factor in Garfield's weight and general lifestyle, dying before 1989 seems more likely than not. But the real horror comes in when you remember that the comic never stopped being printed between 1989 and now, remains in print, and will probably remain so for some time to come. Garfield's still scarfing lasagna and harassing Odie,  but any cat that was born in 1978 should not be alive in 2012, period. And the 1989 comic offers a nice Fridge explanation for all of it..it's a perpetual illusion by a long-dead Garfield. Also note that A: In spite of the fact that birthdays, Christmases, and New Year's are celebrated in the comic with religious punctuality, Jon finally getting Liz is about the only life change in the comic from 1989 to now, B: It's entirely plausible that a house which was low enough on the real estate market to be a freelance cartoonist's bachelor pad circa 1980 would be an abandoned wreck today, and C: Garfield just "snaps out of it" at the end of the strip...no waking up, no being licked by Odie or prodded by Jon..Jon and Odie are just suddenly there again. Conclusion? Garfield has been a hallucinating ghost since some point in the 1980s, and the 1989 strips were a brief, unexplained awakening from the reverie. And the comic since then has been an uninterrupted continuation of the hallucination, including a "happy ending" for his owner that may or may not have actually happened. The creepy cherry on the creepy cake comes in when you note the Aesop at the end of the strips...An Aesop that Garfield never learned until it was too late.
 * In one of the TV specials, Jon wants to take Garfield to the vet because he's been hyperactive. Consider that the cure for hyperactivity in male cats is generally castration. Garfield probably had a legitimate fear of going to the vet.

Fridge Brilliance

 * In this strip, Garfield mentions going to the North Pole to eat a penguin. Intentionally or not, this gaffe makes it obvious that he's BS'ing Nermal.