While trying to come up with a topic for this month’s blog, in the season of love, I couldn’t help but think of Garfield’s love of lasagna…and little else, except maybe sleep. His humorous indifference took him from a comic strip to a media sensation and 80’s icon. I should know, I was a very proud owner of a Garfield lunchbox in the third grade. What was it that made him so special? Quite a bit actually…
Comics featuring animals and pets wasn’t a new idea, with the likes of Marmaduke, Mutts, Calvin and Hobbes, and of course, Snoopy. But none featured cats, which Jim Davis identified in 1978 and thought introducing a comic strip focused on a cat’s interactions with their humans and fellow pets, could capture a whole new audience. And it did just that.
Since June 19, 1978, when Garfield lazily walked onto the pages of 41 newspapers across America, the rotund feline famous for his love of lasagna, naps, and sarcastic asides has occupied a special place in the cultural consciousness. Lazy, self-centered, and an unrepentant grump, the cat turned out to possess enough deadpan charm to entertain generations of audiences.
Garfield was deliberately designed to be highly relatable, inoffensive, and marketable. Jim Davis, the creator, focused on universal themes like eating, sleeping, and a dislike of Mondays, rather than topical politics, allowing the strip to remain timeless and popular across generations. He expresses common human desires to be lazy, overeat, and complain, allowing readers to live vicariously through him and feel less guilty about their own vices.
But Garfield was also very much a creature of the 1980s—maybe the creature of the 1980s, a decade that celebrated conspicuous consumption in all its myriad forms and transformed the character into an A-list superstar. During the “greed is good” era, Davis’s comic-strip cat could be found not only in daily newspapers around the globe—when daily newspapers were a thriving concern and most households were subscribers—but also on the New York Times best-seller list, the cover of People magazine, and as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
That’s in addition to headlining his own Emmy-winning animated TV specials and a Saturday morning cartoon, Garfield and Friends, not to mention the onslaught of merchandise featuring the feline. T-shirts, posters, coffee mugs—you name it, Garfield was on it. At the height of the Garfield craze, people simply couldn’t get enough of the obnoxious, but lovable cat.
“Garfield was all over the place. It was a user-friendly comic strip, which means not a whole lot of words and plenty of white space in between. And if you missed [Garfield] in the paper, you saw [him] in the licensing products and in the back windows of people’s cars or the TV specials. … Garfield was pretty much everywhere.”
– Robert J. Thompson, Professor of Popular Culture, Syracuse University
And as any cat lover will tell you, Garfield is the quintessential fat feline. “I pulled Garfield a little bit from several cats I knew, but more from the fat housecats that lived with my grandparents and friends back in Indiana—cats who had their own chair,” Davis told Entertainment Weekly in 2014. “It was the indoor cats that most influenced Garfield. He was also influenced by a lot of people. Basically, Garfield is a human in a cat suit. He exists in a cat’s body and moves like a cat and does many cat-like things, but really his basic personality is hopefully a lot like we all are, way down deep, with just our basic animal urges.”
Garfield-mania did abate somewhat as the 1990s gave way to the 21st century, but the character never vanished from view. In 2002, Garfield was named the globe’s most widely syndicated comic strip by the Guinness Book of World Records. It made the leap to the big screen in 2004 with Garfield: The Movie, followed two years later by a sequel, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. An animated series called The Garfield Show subsequently premiered in America in 2009.
Garfield-branded merchandise continued to be big business—in 2018, the Guardian reported that the character brought in an estimated $750 million to $1 billion annually worldwide. In more recent years, given the decline in print newspaper circulation, fans young and old have long since begun keeping up with the cat in other media. Davis’s strips can be found online, on such sites as GoComics, and in 2023, Random House published the 75th Garfield book, Garfield Fully Caffeinated.
It’s easy to forget just how revolutionary the notion of Garfield as a kind of lovable antihero was back when the cat first exploded onto the scene, Thompson notes. A protagonist who proudly embraces his flaws—who is, in fact, defined by them—felt entirely new and delightfully subversive. “We were just beginning to see those kinds of characters in the culture,” Thompson says. “Now, of course, it’s commonplace to have non-heroic [protagonists], from Mad Men to Breaking Bad to The Sopranos. They’re all [series about] antiheroes.
“But Garfield was coming out when that was still relatively new, and there was something appealing about his unapologetic, cynical, sarcastic, lazy, hedonistic, apathetic personality,” Thompson continues. “We had all certainly known cats like that, but we also recognized humans like that. In fact, I think a lot of us recognize portions of ourselves in [Garfield]. If we had someone else feeding us and providing a roof over our head like Garfield did, we would probably be happy to lie around all day, dreaming of lasagna and complaining about Mondays.”
And even though the sassy cat, who celebrated his 45th birthday in 2023, has entered middle age, he remains as witty and wily (and hungry) as he’s always been. Times may change, Davis notes, but Garfield remains the same.
