In 2012, Randall Munroe introduced the concept of "today's lucky 10,000" in his webcomic xkcd. He posits that any widely-known fact or idea spreads at a rate of roughly 10,000 people per day. There's really no such thing as something that "everyone knows." If someone you know isn’t familiar with something that you think is obvious, that’s not a failure of theirs.
It just means they’re one of the people who get to learn about it today. If you pay attention to online pop culture, especially on social media and microblogging platforms, you can often see some version of Munroe's lucky 10,000 theory in real time, as new audiences constantly rediscover old material. One of the best examples of this recycling process comes from, of all places, Jim Davis's Garfield. 99% of the time, Garfield is a simple gag-a-day comic that relies on a handful of go-to punchlines: an orange cat that eats too much, a stupid dog, and their weird owner.
It’s a strip that deliberately revels in the mundane, with jokes about coffee, laziness, and gluttony. Then there's that remaining 1%. There are a handful of truly weird comics in the back alleys of what one hesitates to call the "Garfield canon." A useful example is the 1984 graphic novel anthology His 9 Lives, which includes a prose detective story, a science fiction parody, a chase sequence, and a weirdly effective horror short.
There’s also the animated special Garfield in the Rough, which ends with an actual fight scene between Garfield and a wild panther. The single strangest story in the actual newspaper comic, however, might be a G-rated horror arc that’s often nicknamed "Alone." On Oct. 23, 1989, the week before Halloween, readers opened their newspapers to find a distinctly different sort of Garfield. Davis's usual flat 2D layouts were replaced with moody backgrounds and Dutch angles, as Garfield wakes up to find himself alone in an empty house.
Garfield quickly discovers that not only are Jon and Odie gone, but the house looks like it’s been abandoned for years. No one has lived there for a long time, including Garfield himself. It's as if Jon and Odie simply got up and walked out at some point years ago.
Did they deliberately leave Garfield behind? Is this a post-apocalyptic Garfield AU? "After years of taking life for granted," the Oct. 28 strip reads, "Garfield is shaken by a horrifying vision of the inevitable process called 'time.' He has only one weapon... denial." Garfield proceeds to freak out, at which point he seems to return to the present with Jon and Odie.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
