Garfield the cartoon cat turns 40: how his creator brings the lovable, if lazy, character to life
Jim Davis, in Hong Kong to open an exhibition dedicated to his comic-strip cat, explains how the grumpy feline became a global sensation
Time has flown for the fat orange cat who loves to eat lasagne and push stupid dog Odie off the table: comic-strip favourite Garfield recently turned 40. His American cartoonist creator, Jim Davis, who, incidentally, marked his 73rd birthday on July 28, has been in Hong Kong to launch a celebratory exhibition, “Glamorous 40: Garfield’s Art Asia Tour”, at Elements, in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Garfield was “born” on June 19, 1978, when he appeared for the first time, syndicated in 41 newspapers in North America. Today, his antics can be enjoyed in 2,200 newspapers in 111 countries and territories, including Hong Kong, and the lethargic feline – who hates exercise and describes the word diet as “die with a t” – has been featured on millions of items of merchandise, from pencil cases and lunchboxes to coffee mugs (Garfield, after all, loves coffee), pulling in an estimated US$750 million to US$1 billion a year.
Dressed formally in a suit and tie for the exhibition opening, Davis is affable and down-to-earth. He is no stranger to Hong Kong, having visited six times since 1984. It’s all a far cry from his childhood, growing up on a farm in rural Fairmount, Indiana – with 25 cats.
“It was a wonderful life, being outside in the sun, with the animals and plants, and raising food,” Davis recalls. “We worked hard, but we laughed a lot. It was a good life, happy and wholesome.” Any dreams of becoming a farmer though were dashed at a young age; Davis was diagnosed with asthma in infancy and often forced to stay indoors while other children played outside. In consequence, with the pencil and paper supplied by his mother, Davis was encouraged to entertain himself by drawing. His early doodlings were so bad, he says, that he had to caption them: “cow”, “dog”.
“I was awful at it, but [legendary Looney Tunes animator] Chuck Jones said every artist has 100,000 bad drawings in them, and once you get that 100,000 out of the way, every drawing’s going to be good,” Davis says. “If you enjoy drawing, you’re going to draw more. The more you draw, the better you get.”
As Davis improved, he dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. But with limited space in the nation’s funnies pages, which were busy with what he calls the comic-strip “undroppables” – Beetle Bailey, Blondie and Peanuts – he was not always hopeful. He continued drawing, though, and after studying art and business at Ball State University, in the compact Indiana city of Muncie, in the mid-1960s, he found work as a commercial artist with an advertising agency.