Garfield Minus Garfield

Did You Know?

• Mental Floss collected a list of Garfield edits including De-Garfed, which removes only Garfield's thought balloons.
• A Publishers Weekly review said that Jim Davis's own attempts at the concept were mostly gags about Jon Arbuckle.

History

Dan Walsh, a technology manager from Dublin, Ireland, created Garfield Minus Garfield as a blog on Tumblr. It followed other remixes of newspaper comic strips such as The Dysfunctional Family Circus and Marmaduke Explained. Walsh acknowledged that the idea of removing Garfield from his own strip had been discussed on message boards for a couple of years before he started posting, but he believed he championed and popularized it. Jim Davis approved of the work, and in October 2008, Ballantine Books released a Garfield Minus Garfield book in full color, showing original comics alongside the altered ones.

The book is credited to Jim Davis with a foreword by Dan Walsh; most content is Walsh's strips, followed by a small section of Davis's own attempts. A New Yorker review suggested that publishing the originals alongside the edits lessened the effect and was likely done to protect the Garfield brand. Paws, Inc. published its own Garfield Minus Garfield strip on GoComics starting in November 2008, which ended in 2020. Walsh still occasionally publishes comics on his site.

Reception

At its peak, the site received around 300,000 hits each day. The webcomic received attention from major media outlets in 2008, including The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. A Mother Jones reviewer called the strips "devastating (and hilarious) treatises on loneliness." Jim Davis stated he was an occasional reader and found the webcomic "fascinating" and was flattered by the imitation.