About

Garfield is an American comic strip created by Jim Davis that has been running since June 19th, 1978. It is currently the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world, with 300 million readers each day catching up with the strip in 2,580 newspapers.

History

In the 1970's, Jim Davis created a strip entitled Gnorm Gnat, which was met with little success. One editor claimed that his gags were suitable, but that "nobody could relate to bugs." Jim Davis noted to himself that there were many comic strips in which the main character was a dog, but none that featured a cat as the main star. Since Davis had grown up with 25 cats on a farm in Muncie, Indiana, Jim Davis created Garfield. He started slow as he first released the strip, syndicated in 41 newspapers. The strip was soon met with huge success. In 1982, Jim Davis created PAWS, Inc. to handle the merchandise, drawings, writings, and all other things Garfield. That same year, Here Comes Garfield began airing on television. Garfield and Friends was an animated TV series airing on CBS from 1988 to 1994. A slew of video games were released during the mid-late 1980's and the early 1990's, the most notable of them being Garfield: Caught in the Act, released in 1995 to the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Windows PC's. In 1996, albeit to little fanfare, the official Garfield website was launched. Jim Davis would also team up with Ball State University and Pearson Digital Learning to create Professor Garfield, an educational website aimed towards assisting kids in learning about math and language arts. By that time, Garfield would be recognized in over 111 countries. By 2004, $1 billion worth of merchandise had been sold. In June 2004, 20th Century FOX immortalized the cat by releasing Garfield: The Movie in theaters. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties was released as a sequel in 2006. Over 130 million Garfield comic books had been sold worldwide at the time. During the 2000's, three direct-to-video films were released. With the strip nearing it's 30th anniversary, the CGI-based TV series The Garfield Show made it's debut in 2007.

Related Topics

Garfielf

Garfielf refers to an intentionally poor-quality parody video of Garfield. On April 4th, 2013, the video was uploaded onto YouTube. In the video, the characters are poorly drawn and uses Text-to-Speech narration.

Garfield Minus Garfield

Garfield Minus Garfield is a web based comic strip created by Dan Walsh that rose to prominence in 2008. Each strip is a reprint of previous Garfield strips, but Garfield is digitally removed from them, generally just consisting of Garfield’s owner Jon Arbuckle interacting with himself. The strip's website characterizes it as “a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young every-man as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb”.

Garfield Kart

Garfield Kart is a go-kart racing game which bears many similarities to Nintendo’s Mario Kart series. Following its release on the 3DS and the Steam store in 2015, the game was widely mocked online for its unimaginative gameplay, low production value and poorly designed mechanics.

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