Garfield, the lasagna-loving cat who hates Mondays, is in his 50th year if his story is counted from Jon, the comic strip Jim Davis began publishing in The Pendleton Times in Indiana in January 1976. Half a century on, the cat is still in daily strips, books, films and a long line of licensed products.
The strip went into national syndication on June 19, 1978, starting in 41 American newspapers. By 2002 Guinness World Records had named it the world's most widely syndicated comic strip. In 2018 The Guardian reported that the character brought in an estimated $750 million to $1 billion a year worldwide.
The strip that was meant to be about Jon
Garfield was not originally the star. Jon, which ran from January 1976 to March 1978, followed Jon Arbuckle's misadventures with his friend Lyman and his failed attempts to find a date. Garfield was a side character who often did not appear at all.
In a 2018 interview with Mental Floss, Davis recalled showing the strip to T.K. Ryan, the creator of Tumbleweeds, whose assistant he had been. "I ran some early ideas at a local paper to see how I felt about it and I called the strip Jon. It was about him, but he had this wise cat who, every time, came back zinging him. He always had the great payoff," Davis said. "And T.K. said, 'Well, what does that tell you, Jim? The strip must be about the cat. Go with it.'"
The strip was renamed Garfield in 1977 and relaunched for syndication soon afterwards, with Davis redrawing several Jon gags. Before Jon, Davis had tried a strip called Gnorm Gnat, about a sarcastic bug, which first appeared in 1973 but was not picked up by other papers. One editor told him, according to Garfield's Twentieth Anniversary Collection, that "nobody can relate to bugs!"
The cat's look changed over the decades. He started out standing on four legs, with small eyes, and became mostly upright with a far more expressive face. Davis has said Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, sketched suggestions for him after a chance meeting, explaining that Snoopy had small back feet when sitting and larger feet when standing. "From that day on he walked, and it was thanks to Charles Schulz," Davis said.
A newsprint shortage in 1983 led papers to shrink their comic sections, and Davis enlarged Garfield's eyes, mouth and lettering. "I had to make the eyes bigger, and the mouth bigger, to get the expressions literally big enough so that people – older people, older readers — could see," he said in a 2021 interview with Heritage Auctions.
Designed to reach everyone
Davis has been open about building Garfield for a wide audience. "I'd like to say it was some sort of a divine inspiration that created the strip," he told The Washington Post in 1982. "In fact, it wasn't so much that as a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character."
He noticed that dog strips such as Peanuts were doing well and decided to create one for cat lovers, drawing on the cats on his parents' farm in Fairmount, Indiana. In the same interview he said an animal had wide appeal: "By virtue of being a cat, Garfield's not black, white, male or female, young, or old or a particular nationality."
He deliberately kept the strip free of topical references so that it would travel. "If you were to mention the football strike, you're going to be excluding everyone else in the world that doesn't watch pro football," he said. "In an effort to keep the gags broad, the humor general and applicable to everyone, I deal mainly with eating and sleeping. That applies to everyone, anywhere."
That approach helped the strip work in translation. Davis told the National Post in 2007 that he avoided proper names and colloquialisms, adding that "for a while, Garfield loved sushi in Japan. Until Italian restaurants opened up and they knew what lasagna was."
Davis has described the character's appeal as recognition. "I hold a mirror to the reader and show them [their lives] back with a humorous twist, that's all," he said. "We're made to feel guilty for overeating, not exercising, and over-sleeping. Garfield relieves our guilt by enjoying all of those things."
From best-seller lists to the box office
The commercial success came quickly. In November 1982, seven Garfield books were among the top 15 titles on The New York Times trade paperback best-seller list. That year the strip was running in 1,300 newspapers, and Paws, Inc., the company Davis formed to handle Garfield products, expected licensing to gross an estimated $50-$60 million.
Television followed with prime-time specials, which ran every year from 1982 to 1991, and the Saturday morning series Garfield and Friends, which ran for seven seasons from 1988 to 1994. Garfield: The Movie, with Bill Murray voicing the cat, grossed $203 million worldwide in 2004 and was followed by a sequel two years later. The Garfield Show began in the US in 2009.
The Garfield Movie, an animated feature with Chris Pratt as the cat, took the No 1 spot at the North American box office in 2024. In its first two weeks it grossed $156 million worldwide. In 2023, Random House published the 75th Garfield book, Garfield Fully Caffeinated.
The merchandise has reached as far as phones, slippers, tents, eye shadow and toilet seat covers. For 30 years, pieces of Garfield phones washed up on a beach in western France. The New York Times reported in 2019 that the source was a long-lost shipping container in a sea cave.
A second life online
The Internet has given the strip an audience of a different kind. In 2008 Dan Walsh, a technology manager in Dublin, created Garfield Minus Garfield, which removes the cat and the other animals from the strips and leaves Jon talking to himself. Davis licensed a book of it.
Other remixes followed. Pipe Garfield replaces the last panel of every strip with a 1978 panel of Garfield smoking a pipe, and Garfield Randomized assembles strips from three unrelated panels. Fatal Farm, the duo of Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max, made Lasagna Cat, a YouTube series of live-action recreations of strips. It ran over two seasons released nine years apart, and one episode has been viewed 3.9 million times.
Still drawn every day
Davis sold the rights to Garfield to Viacom in 2019 but continues to oversee the strip. "I write gags, and a couple of other people submit writing that I edit for use. I have long-time assistants who work on the drawing, inking, and coloring of the strip. I approve, sign, and date each strip before it goes out," he said.
Mike Peterson, who writes the Comic Strip of the Day feature for the Daily Cartoonist website, compared Garfield with long-running strips taken over by other artists after their creators' deaths. "Garfield is still being produced," he said. "It's still a fresh strip every day. It's a new piece."
With print newspaper circulation falling, readers now also find the strip online on sites such as GoComics. Davis has said the character's constancy is the point. "In a world where life is changing almost daily, Garfield still loves lasagna and hates Mondays," he said.