Four decades since Jim Davis introduced his sardonic, lasagne-loving cat to the world, Garfield is read by 200m people every day. He talks about chasing the perfect gag and avoiding politics

Forty years ago this Tuesday, an orange tabby cat peered lugubriously at the world from the panels of his first comic strip. “Our only thought is to entertain you,” says his owner, Jon Arbuckle, brightly and guilelessly. “Feed me,” thinks the corpulent, Monday-loathing, sardonic Garfield, the eponymous hero of what would go on to become the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The first panel of the first Garfield strip, from 19 June 1978. Photograph: Paws Inc

Back on 19 June 1978, though, Garfield made his debut in just 41 newspapers, all in the US. A couple of months later, that number fell by one: the Chicago Sun-Times decided to drop the strip. Garfield’s creator, cartoonist Jim Davis was close to panic. “Here I am, 90 days into my dream career, and I lose a newspaper,” says Davis, speaking from his 200-acre country home outside Muncie, Indiana. “I thought, ‘This is it, it’s downhill from here.’”

Before Garfield was published, Davis had been working as assistant cartoonist while shopping around his idea for a strip about a bug, Gnorm Gnat, without success.

“Newspaper syndicates were getting tens of thousands of submissions from hopeful cartoonists a year and taking one or two. The odds were heavily against me,” he remembers. But eventually, a syndicate editor told him that “your gags are great, but bugs – nobody can relate to bugs”, and Davis, showing a cannily commercial approach that would serve him in good stead when it came to Garfield’s vast merchandising empire, rethought his approach. “I took a long hard look at the comics. I saw dogs doing well. But no cats. I thought, ‘Huh!’”

Davis quit his​ job and went all in for Garfield, despite a first pay cheque of, he estimates, $38 (£28) for the month

Named after his grandfather, James Garfield Davis (“a rather stern and intimidating person, but he had these really kind eyes – he was a teddy bear”), Garfield is a composite of the dozens of stray cats on Davis’s childhood farm. He developed the strip over a year, creating a cast of contrasting characters to interact with his lazy, lasagne-loving cat – geeky owner Jon, the playful, brainless dog Odie, Garfield’s vet Liz, and kitten Nermal. The strip was picked up – and then shortly afterwards dropped – by the Chicago Sun-Times. But readers bombarded the paper with more than 1,300 phone calls and letters demanding Garfield’s return. (The paper quickly acquiesced.)

So Davis quit his job and went all in for Garfield, showing a steely confidence despite a first pay cheque of, he estimates, $38 (£28) for the month. But by 1983, 1,000 papers were running Garfield. By 2002, it had the Guinness World Record for the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world, with an estimated 200m daily readers turning to the crotchety feline in 2,570 newspapers across the globe. There are countless bestselling Garfield books (Davis’s company Paws Inc says more than 135m have sold worldwide), television series, films, toys, clothes, mugs. (Garfield merchandise brings in an estimated $750m-$1bn a year.) There’s even a musical.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 1989 Garfield strip. Photograph: Used with permission of Paws Inc

At 72, Davis still writes and roughs out the strips himself, although a team completes them; the morning we talk, he’s been working on a couple, as well as a ride for a Garfield theme park. Sitting down to dream up a new strip, he’ll visualise the cat and then “send him up a tree, have him look out of a window, send him camping … and then I watch him until he does something funny, and I back up three frames and cut him off”.

Garfield himself has changed over the decades in what Davis calls an “almost a Darwinian evolution”. Today, his eyes and mouth are larger, and his body is slightly smaller, which helps with the more physical humour Davis has introduced. Peanuts creator Charles M Schulz helped get Garfield from four paws to two, advising Davis that – like Snoopy – Garfield needed to lose his “tiny cat feet” when he stands up. (“He drew these two big feet on Garfield and he was standing. Magic.”)

The nature of the humour has changed, too, says Davis. “The first two or three years I got all the obvious cat gags out of the way,” he says. “Now I can take advantage of the fact people know him, the familiarity is much higher. You always expected to see Snoopy lying on the doghouse, for Charlie Brown to miss the football. There are certain things that make you feel warm and fuzzy, that have happened that way all your life, like telling an old joke over again. For some of us, it just gets funnier.”



I stay away from the political... what’s going on is awful and very depressing, and comics can lighten things up. Jim Davis

In a foreword to Age Happens, a new book celebrating Garfield’s 40th anniversary, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda writes how Davis’s gags are “such a mix of verbal and visual humour – he can make you laugh with a patented Garfield one-liner, or a pie in the face from an unexpected location”, describing Garfield himself as “an ironic, detached cat who is mean to everyone and somehow all the more lovable for it”.

Davis says he has come to understand that when people laugh at Garfield, they’re recognising themselves. “We live in a time when we’re made to feel guilty about overeating, oversleeping, not exercising. Garfield not only does all that stuff but he’s cool with that. I think in a way he relieves our guilt,” he says. “Garfield is everyone’s alter ego.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Used with permission of Paws Inc

The cartoonist has always been careful to steer clear of social and political commentary in his strips. “I consciously stay away from the political because it’s in the rest of the newspaper. They handle it better than I ever would,” he says. “I’m dealing with very basic things, eating and sleeping, and I predict everyone’s still going to be eating and sleeping 40 years from now. Will there be a denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula 40 years from now? I doubt it. And that’s the point – I want him to be the cat next door and I feel a real responsibility to balance the scales. With what’s going on in the economy, in politics, it’s awful and very depressing, so the purpose of the comics is to lighten things up, to go, ‘Hey, let’s not take ourselves so seriously, folks.’”

With thousands upon thousands of Garfield strips published over the years, Davis is adamant that he remains fascinated by his feline creation. And while he has his charitable and environmental concerns – the Professor Garfield literacy foundation, and a project to return his 200 acres to its natural state – it’s the comics he really loves.

“The novelty’s not worn off because I’m still trying to get it right,” he says. “Now and then if you can do some silly gag that comes out of left field, that delights the readers, that’s worth a lot. That’s what I go for all the time. One day, I’d like to write that gag that makes the whole world laugh.”

He’d like to see Garfield continue, even when he puts down his pencil. “I would like to do it for as long as I feel I have something to contribute to it, until someone taps me on the shoulder and says ‘Jim, you’re not funny anymore, stop it,’” he says. “I can’t believe 40 years has gone by. It’s been like a finger snap.”