Garfield has long featured the homebound adventures of just three characters — odd cartoonist Jon Arbuckle, hostile cat Garfield, and sweet dog Odie. However, in the early days of the strip, in the late '70s and early '80s, there was a fourth main character. His name was Lyman, and in the backstory of the comic, he was Jon's human roommate and the guy who brought Odie into the living situation. As Davis drew the strip and the characters' different dynamics developed, he realized that Jon no longer needed a human to talk to, since Garfield had become his sounding board, with the cat responding in thought balloons. So, one day in 1983, Lyman was in the Garfield strip, and the next day, he just wasn't.
According to Neatorama, Lyman was never spoken of for years and seen only a couple of times, once in a flashback and again as part of a title panel in a tenth anniversary strip. Hardcore Garfield fans always wondered just what happened to Lyman, and creator Jim Davis joked in a 1988 Garfield collection (via Bored Panda), "Don't look in Jon's basement." That quip was later referenced in the Garfield computer game Garfield's Spooky Scavenger Hunt, depicting Lyman shackled in a dungeon." In a 2014 Garfield comic book, however, Lyman is alive and well, and we learn that he went off to work as a wildlife photographer.
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