10 Comic Book Arcs That Went On Too Damn Long

Although this story arc was only six short comic strips long, and was told using a grand total of twenty-two panels, it deserves a place on this list for a very special reason.

We're talking about Garfield here: a daily newspaper strip that usually has no ongoing storyline at all. Particularly when this was published over one week in 1989, it was completely out of the ordinary for Garfield to have any sort of continuous narrative. The regular formula consisted of three panels of a lazy cat eating lasagne, tormenting his owner Jon, or kicking Odie the dog off a table. But in every single way, this arc was completely out of the ordinary.

The story began with Garfield waking up in a cold, abandoned house that looked not unlike his own. Over six days, we explored the depths of the house pet's surprisingly broken psyche. The narrative high-key implied that the majority of Garfield strips actually take place inside the delusional mind of a cat who has been abandoned by his owner. Slowly dying of starvation in an empty home, Garfield remains so completely in denial about his loved ones shunning him that he hallucinates an alternate life in which they never left.

This arc proved to be weirdly haunting and undeniably spooky. Newspaper readers, who just wanted to get a daily chuckle from a silly cat, had to suffer through existential angst for a full week before Garfield returned to his usual (and apparently delusional) self.