Well now I'm getting all philosophical about it. Is it still Garfield if he's partially digested? Where does Garfield end and snake begin? Maybe it really is Garfield (without Garfield) after all. I know I've ruined it either way.
While the Heathcliff variant is more prevalent on Lemmy, Garfield Minus Garfield does exist and is highly enjoyable. I haven't checked, but I suspect it inspired the Heathcliff one.
Heathcliff without Heathcliff wasn't inspired by Garfield but I know it seems that way. A friend was posting its Heathcliff each day and I was confounded by the impenetrableness for months. But after I started figuring it out I noticed that Heathcliff was almost completely irrelevant to most of the strips and started removing him to see how often they still worked as designed.
But since G-G already existed there is no way to remove the idea that one caused the other in most minds. I didn't really care for G-G because I really never cared for Garfield in the first place.