From The Onion A/V Club’s 12 Memorable Newspaper Comic Strip Deaths

Of course, some people claim that Garfield himself died back in the late 1980s, when the strip ran an eerie, inexplicable weeklong storyline in which Garfield wakes up to the realization that his home is an abandoned, disintegrating part of a barren landscape. Running from room to room in a panic, he realizes he’s alone. (Weird inset narration panel: “You have no idea how alone you are, Garfield.”) Briefly, he encounters Jon and Odie, and reaches to accept the food Jon offers, but the entire thing turns out to be a mirage. The weird narration continues, over creepy images of a sweaty, squinting eye and a screaming Garfield: “Locked fast within a time when he no longer exists, Garfield grapples with his greatest fear… loneliness. He has only one weapon… denial.” Whereupon Jon and Odie reappear, and the storyline abruptly ends with some blather about the power of imagination. Some fans have suggested that this all means Garfield is either dead, or dying of hunger in an abandoned house, and that the rest of the strip is his fevered attempt to imagine a better life for himself. Doesn’t that make the strip’s saccharine repetitions a lot more interesting?

I’m pretty sure it’s a mesquite tree, although it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen. The trunk is probably 3 feet in diameter, and it’s incredibly gnarled and twisted. There are big thorns on the lower branches, but none that we could see on the upper ones. The bark is twisted too, and in some parts looks like it was shredded and then glued back haphazardly on to the branches. It’s spooky. It’s beautiful.

I went back after dark and took some pictures.

“baby ben”… benjamin franklin baby doll.

or something a bit on the lighter side, but still disturbing in its own way… unfortunate children’s books.