The Monday a Lazy Orange Cat Took Over the Funny Pages
On June 19, 1978, Jim Davis's Garfield debuted in 41 newspapers — and grew into the most widely syndicated comic strip in history.
On a Monday morning in June 1978, readers of 41 newspapers met a fat orange cat who hated Mondays, loved lasagna, and tormented his owner with magnificent laziness. His name was Garfield.
His creator, Indiana cartoonist Jim Davis, had spent years drawing a strip called Gnorm Gnat, about a gnat. Editors told him the art was good and the gags were great, but readers could never identify with a bug. So Davis switched to a creature everyone knew: a cat, modeled on the cats he had grown up with. He named the character after his grandfather, James A. Garfield Davis, whom Davis described as a large, cantankerous man.
Davis spent about a year and a half developing the strip. It first ran in his local paper as Jon, centered on the bachelor cartoonist Jon Arbuckle, before Davis renamed it Garfield in 1977 and gave the cat top billing. United Feature Syndicate accepted it for national distribution in January 1978, and the first strip debuted nationwide on June 19, 1978 — fittingly, a Monday.
Success was not instant. The Chicago Sun-Times dropped the strip after a test run, only to be flooded with some 1,300 angry letters from readers demanding its return. The paper reinstated it, and the publicity helped Garfield spread like wildfire. By early 1981, less than three years after launch, the strip appeared in 850 newspapers and had generated more than $15 million in merchandise. Davis founded Paws, Inc. to manage the growing empire.
The numbers kept climbing. By 2002, Garfield ran in about 2,570 newspapers with an estimated 263 million readers worldwide, and in 2003 the Guinness Book of World Records named it the world's most widely syndicated comic strip. Along the way came animated television specials, series, and feature films, all starring the same lazy cat who kicked Odie off the table.
Davis kept refining his creation. In the 1980s Garfield slimmed down, stood on two legs, and grew more expressive — changes Davis said made the character easier to animate and stage in visual gags, like shoving Odie off the table. His mentor in the business was none other than Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, who advised him on licensing and merchandising. The strip's themes never changed: laziness, obsessive eating, and a hatred of Mondays and diets that readers everywhere recognized in themselves.
Garfield's secret was its simplicity: no politics, no preaching, just a cat, his put-upon owner Jon, and the dog Odie, in gags anyone in any country could understand. A strip about a bug nobody could relate to became, within a generation, the most-read comic strip on Earth — all because one cartoonist listened when an editor told him to draw a cat instead.
Photo: Ducky, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
