Garfield

Garfield is a daily-syndicated comic strip created by Jim Davis. It chronicles the life of the title character, Garfield, a tabby cat, his owner, Jon Arbuckle, and the dog, Odie. more...

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As of 2007, it is syndicated in roughly 2,570 newspapers and journals and it currently holds the Guinness World Record for being the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip. The popularity of the strip has led to an animated television series, several animated television specials and two theatrical feature-length live-action films, as well as a large amount of Garfield merchandise and at least three unique strips.

Overview

Garfield debuted on June 19, 1978, which is considered to be Garfield’s birthday. The strip makes fun of pet owners and their relationship with their pets, often with the pet as the true master of the household. Garfield also struggles with human problems, such as diets, Mondays, apathy, boredom, and so on. Garfield is able to undergo changes from time to time (his rear paws are now drawn as proportionally huge), because he was too fat to walk on four legs. By the middle of 1983, his familiar appearance—featuring oval-shaped eyes—had taken shape. By this time, Garfield was walking on two feet, and the strip emphasized sitcom situations such as Garfield making fun of Jon’s stupidity and his inability to date. Jon and Odie have also evolved quite a bit, from being thin and starkly colored to the cartoons they are today.

Like many comic strips, Garfield is not exclusively drawn by its creator. Jim Davis still writes and makes rough sketches for the strip, but his company, Paws, employs cartoonists and assistants who do most of the work of the finished drawing and inking, while Davis’s final job is usually confined to approving and signing the finished strip. Otherwise, Davis spends most of his time managing the business and merchandising of Garfield.

Learning from the indifference towards his previous comic strip creation Gnorm Gnat, Jim Davis has made a conscious effort to include all readers in Garfield; keeping the jokes broad and the humor general and applicable to everyone. As a result the strip typically avoids the social or political commentary present in some of Garfield’s contemporaries, such as The Boondocks, Doonesbury, Dilbert, and Cathy. Although a couple of strips in 1978 addressed inflation and, arguably, organized labor, as well as Jon frequently smoking a pipe or subscribing to a bachelor magazine, these elements were ultimately pruned from the product with the intent of maintaining a more universal appeal. Davis adamantly disavowed social commentary in an interview published at the beginning of one of the book compilations, joking that he once believed that OPEC was a denture adhesive.

Read more at Wikipedia.org