Garfield: Lyman Theory

I'm pretty sure everyone's heard of Garfield. Mostly everybody has seen the comic strips and the various television series and those terrible, awful movies (at least in me and many others' opinions).

Well, if you've read the comic from the very beginning (I doubt many have), you probably have heard of a character known as Lyman, who was Jon Arbuckle's roommate and the original owner of Odie. He only appeared in a few strips before disappearing and hasn't been seen since. Lyman only made two appearances since leaving the comic, which were a title panel for Garfield's 10th anniversary and the other being a flashback.

Well, there might be a scary reason why he's never seen again in the comics. One that certainly made me think...

In a 20th anniversary collection of Garfield strips, Davis gave a number of reasons for Lyman's disappearance.

The first being the sentence:

"Don't look in Jon's basement!"

Pretty creepy. It sent chills down my spine the first time reading it and it really made me think.

But that's not the creepiest part...

In the online game, Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt, players can unlock a secret room in the basement of a haunted house.

In there, you find this:



There, on the wall, is Lyman chained up. If you interact with him, he will say he's starving and asks for food, but if you leave the room and come back, he will be gone.

Even creepier is that in Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt 2, Lyman's head jumps out of an oven to scare you.

Lyman later reappeared in an episode of The Garfield Show (a successor to Garfield and Friends) in an episode called "Long Lost Lyman".

Still, though, it really does make you think differently about Jon.