Garfield

• 1. Introduction

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  As of 2013, the comic strip Garfield ran in roughly 2,580 newspapers and journals. That reach earned it a Guinness World Record as the world's most widely syndicated comic strip. American cartoonist Jim Davis created it, and it grew into a media franchise far larger than any newspaper page. Its stars are a cat named Garfield, a dog named Odie and their owner, Jon Arbuckle. Yet the strip began as a second attempt, after an earlier failure. What did Davis learn from that failure? How did a small-town paper carry the strip into national syndication? And what happens when fans edit the cat out of his own comic?

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• 2. Cat Among Bugs

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  In 1973, Jim Davis created a strip called Gnorm Gnat while working as an assistant on T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds. It ran in the Pendleton Times of Pendleton, Indiana, from 1973 to 1975 and met with little success. Davis also tried to syndicate it and failed. One editor told him that his "art was good, his gags were great, but nobody can identify with bugs."

  Davis was born in Marion, Indiana, and raised on a farm in Fairmount, Indiana. After the rejection, he studied the strips running in newspapers to judge which animals readers might prefer. He felt that dogs were well represented. He also noticed that no cat character held a prominent place.

  The cat's name came from James A. Garfield Davis, the creator's grandfather. Davis described him as "a large, cantankerous man," and that personality shaped the character. So did the cats Davis grew up with.

  A coffee advertisement from the 1950s supplied the name of Jon Arbuckle. Jon's roommate Lyman was added to give Jon someone to talk with, and his name came from a character in Gnorm Gnat. Lyman's dog was first called Spot. The dog became Odie to avoid confusion with a dog of the same name in the comic strip Boner's Ark.

  All of these characters first reached readers under a different title, in the same Indiana paper that had run Gnorm Gnat.

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• 3. Going National

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  Two weeks after Gnorm Gnat ended, a new strip titled Jon first appeared in the Pendleton Times on the 8th of January 1976. It kept that title until the 1st of September 1977, when it was renamed Garfield.

  In 2019, the YouTuber Quinton Hoover found microfilm archives of the Jon strips at the Pendleton Community Library and the Indiana State Library. Until then, the early strips had been largely unavailable to the public for many years.

  In March 1978, United Feature Syndicate accepted the strip for national distribution. The last Pendleton Times strip ran on the 2nd of March 1978. The syndicate launched Garfield nationwide on the 19th of June 1978, in 41 newspapers.

  The Chicago Sun-Times dropped the strip after a test run. Readers complained, and the paper put it back.

  From 1984 onward, the cat on the page looked very different from the one in the strips of 1976-83. Garfield began walking on his hind legs, slimmed down and became more expressive. The change has been described as a "Darwinian evolution." Davis said it made the character easier to animate and to stage in gags, such as pushing Odie off a table or reaching for food.

  Part of the redesign followed advice from Charles M. Schulz, Davis's mentor and erstwhile rival. Schulz thought Garfield was less subtle than his own strip, Peanuts. Still, he gave valuable guidance, especially on licensing and merchandising. Davis later applied many of these strategies to the Garfield franchise.

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• 4. Paws and Profits

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  By the start of 1981, less than three years after its national launch, Garfield ran in 850 newspapers and had sold over $15 million in merchandise. To manage that merchandise, Davis founded Paws, Inc. in 1981. In 1982 the strip appeared in more than 1,000 newspapers.

  By 2002, Garfield appeared in 2,570 newspapers and reached 263 million readers worldwide. By 2004 it ran in nearly 2,600 papers. Its merchandise sold in 111 countries and was worth between $750 million and $1 billion.

  In 1994, Paws, Inc. bought all rights to the strips from 1978 to 1993 from United Feature Syndicate. The original black-and-white dailies and original color Sundays remain copyrighted to United Feature. The full-color dailies and recolored Sundays belong to Paws, since they count as a different product. Today Andrews McMeel Syndication distributes the strip.

  Davis keeps creative control and is the only person credited in newspapers. Even so, he now only writes the strip and usually does the rough sketches. Since the late 1990s, long-time assistants Brett Koth and Gary Barker have done most of the work. Other artists handle inking and coloring, while Davis supervises production and merchandises the characters. Paws employs a staff of nearly 50 artists and licensing administrators.

  On the 6th of August 2019, Viacom announced that it would acquire Paws, Inc., including most rights to the strip, the merchandise and the animated cartoons. Viacom is now called Paramount Skydance Corporation. The sale placed Garfield under the Nickelodeon banner. The deal left out the live-action films, which remain with The Walt Disney Company through its 20th Century Studios label.

  The 2024 animated film was also outside the deal. It was released by Alcon Entertainment and Sony Pictures under its Columbia Pictures label.

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• 5. Garfield Everywhere

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  In March 1980, Ballantine Books published Garfield at Large, the first collection of the strip in book form. Collections like it helped the strip grow in popularity, and several reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

  Davis designed these books to be considerably longer and less tall than a typical book. That shape let the strip keep its newspaper layout, instead of stacking the panels vertically as earlier anthologies often did. The publishing industry now calls it the "Garfield format." Other publishers adopted it, and Davis noted that collections of The Far Side were among them.

  Garfield merchandise ranges from clothing, toys, games and dolls to Caribbean cruises and credit cards. It also includes DVDs of the movies and the television series. In April 2024, Motel 6 named Garfield its first "Chief Pet Officer" and announced Garfield-themed rooms for the release of The Garfield Movie.

  In 2018, a ghost restaurant themed on the franchise, GarfieldEATS, opened in Dubai. Customers ordered through the official mobile app, which also held games and let users buy episodes of Garfield and Friends. The menu offered lasagna, Garfield-shaped pizza, "Garfuccinos" and Garfield-shaped dark chocolate bars. A second location opened in Toronto in 2019. The restaurant closed in 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic and a dispute over rent.

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• 6. Lasagna and Mondays

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  Garfield is an obese orange tabby whose personality rests on sarcasm, laziness and gluttony. His favorite food is lasagna, though he will eat nearly anything except raisins and spinach. He also eats Jon's houseplants and other pets.

  His dislikes fill much of the strip. Mondays, diets, spiders and any form of exertion top the list. He sheds constantly, which annoys Jon, and he abuses both Odie and Jon. Odie, a dim-witted yellow dog, usually takes the worst of it.

  Household pests get mixed treatment. Garfield generally spares mice and even cooperates with them to cause mischief. Spiders he will readily swat or pound flat.

  Jon Arbuckle has an affinity for stereotypically nerdy pastimes. For much of the strip's history, his unsuccessful attempts at dating were a recurring theme, particularly involving Dr. Liz Wilson, the pets' veterinarian. After a 2006 story arc, the two became engaged and started living together.

  Jon also visits his unnamed parents and his brother, Doc Boy, on the family farm. These trips bring week-long displays of foolishness. In one strip, Jon and Doc Boy sit on a couch watching socks float in the washing machine as if it were television. Doc Boy exclaims, "There goes the red sock again!"

  Characters often break the fourth wall to explain something to readers or to set up a punchline. In one strip, Garfield catches a cold and complains that his thoughts are stuffed up.

  The strip offers almost no social or political commentary, which was Davis's original intention. He admitted that his "grasp of politics isn't strong" and joked that for many years he thought "OPEC was a denture adhesive."

  The strip rarely names its setting in print. The television special Happy Birthday, Garfield states that Garfield lives in Muncie, Indiana, the hometown of the creator.

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• 7. Lost and Alone

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  The week before Halloween in 1989, Garfield strips stopped trying to be funny. In the story, Garfield wakes in a future where the house is abandoned and he no longer exists. Davis explained the idea in Garfield's Twentieth Anniversary Collection: "I wanted to scare people. And what do people fear most? Why, being alone." He recalled that reaction ranged from "Right on!" to "This isn't a trend, is it?"

  The longest of the recurring storylines about Garfield getting lost ran from the 25th of August to the 28th of September 1986. It began when Jon told Garfield to go get the newspaper. Garfield stepped outside and wondered what would happen if he wandered off. Then he decided to find out.

  Jon sent Odie to find him, and Odie, being not too bright, got lost as well. Jon grew lonely and offered a reward for the return of both pets. He was not descriptive, so people brought animals to his house, including an elephant, monkeys, a seal, a snake, a kangaroo with her joey, and turtles.

  Meanwhile, a small girl adopted Odie. The two pets later met at a circus that they briefly joined, and they also visited a pet shop. Eventually both made it home.

  Another storyline ran from the 3rd to the 23rd of December 1984. Jon left on a business trip around Christmas and gave Garfield a week's worth of food, which the cat devoured instantly. Garfield then left the house and got locked out. He reunited with his mother and made it home in the snow on Christmas Eve.

  Part of that storyline was taken from the 1983 Emmy-winning special Garfield on the Town.

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• 8. Beyond the Page

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  On the 15th of May 1980, CBS aired The Fantastic Funnies, Garfield's animation debut, with Scott Beach voicing the cat. The strip was only two years old, so Garfield was introduced as a newcomer among the featured comics.

  From 1982 to 1991, twelve primetime cartoon specials aired, along with an hour-long primetime documentary celebrating the character's 10th anniversary. Lorenzo Music voiced Garfield in all of them. A Saturday-morning show, Garfield and Friends, ran for seven seasons from 1988 to 1994, again with Music in the lead role.

  The Garfield Show began development in 2007 to coincide with the strip's 30th anniversary in 2008. It premiered in France in December 2008 and reached Cartoon Network in the United States on the 2nd of November 2009.

  Garfield: The Movie reached theaters on the 11th of June 2004. Its sequel, A Tail of Two Kitties, followed on the 16th of June 2006. Both mixed live action with a computer-animated cat voiced by Bill Murray. Critics reviewed them poorly, but both were commercial successes.

  On the 24th of May 2016, a new computer-animated film was announced, with Mark Dindal directing. Chris Pratt was named the voice of Garfield on the 1st of November 2021. Samuel L. Jackson joined in May 2022 as Vic, Garfield's father. The film opened on the 24th of May 2024 and took in $255.4 million worldwide on a budget of $60 million. A sequel was announced on the 8th of July 2025, with Pratt confirmed to return.

  Atari developed a Garfield game for its Atari 2600 console, and it appears in the company's 1984 catalog. After Atari sold off its home games and computers division, owner Jack Tramiel decided the character's royalties were too expensive for a declining video game industry. The game was cancelled. A ROM image was later released with Davis's blessing.

  Producer Joseph Papp, known for A Chorus Line, once discussed a Garfield stage musical, but complications stopped it. A full-length musical, Garfield Live, finally premiered on the 18th of January 2011 in Muncie, Indiana, after its tour start slipped from September 2010. Davis wrote the book. Michael Dansicker and Bill Meade wrote the music and lyrics, and the opening song was called "Cattitude." After the North American tour ended in 2012, the show toured throughout Asia.

  Fans reshaped the strip online too. In 2008, a website called Garfield Minus Garfield, by Dan Walsh, drew coverage from news media. It removed the cat and the other main characters from original strips, leaving Jon talking to himself. Similar edits had appeared online as early as 2006.

  At its peak, the site received as many as 300,000 hits per day. Fans connected with Jon's "loneliness and desperation." Davis called the strips an "inspired thing to do" and said that "some of the strips work better than the originals." Ballantine Books released a volume of them on the 28th of October 2008, with Davis as author and a foreword by Walsh.

  In March 2026, it was announced that a new animated series had been picked up by Paramount+, with Lamorne Morris set to voice the cat.

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