Consider the Gothic ontology of Garfield. His shadowy reality is exposed by a single storyline:
The clear implication, at the end of the bizarre arc from October 23rd to the 28th, 1989, is that the entirety of the Garfield comic strip is, in some way, an elaborate hallucination, a paranoid delusion, or an extended meditation on a stage of grief.
It's a weird storyline, like a cross between old EC comics and It's a Wonderful Life. But the conclusion is ectoplasmic:
Garfield is a ghost. And a real ghost, not some bullshit about a lingering soul trying to finish up his business. Ghosts are space. They are, particularly, a becoming-consciousness of space. Ghosts are not embodied, or if they are, it is a function of narrative and not ghost-ness; ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space. And so, apparently, is Garfield.
(Thanks to Jesse "Not Odie" Walker)
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