Back in June we celebrated the birthday of America’s most apathetic cartoon feline. Today is the birthday of that feline’s creator, Jim Davis. This Tuesday also happens to be National Lasagna Day – yes, it’s a real thing, because every delicious food now has its own holiday apparently – which just seems far too perfect to simply be a coincidence. Now, National Lasagna Day wasn’t yet a thing when Garfield strolled into the funny pages of newspapers in 1978 to remind us all just how truly terrible Mondays are, but there’s undoubtedly no better mascot for the celebration of lasagna.
So in honor of Jim Davis and his orange lasagna-loving cat, I’ve pulled a few interesting facts about how Davis got started in cartooning and his inspiration for how Garfield came to be.
He planned to be farmer before becoming a cartoonist. Given that he had a comic strip about farm life called U.S. Acres, it’s not at all surprising that Jim Davis knows a few things about agriculture. His father was a farmer in Indiana and Davis planned on following in his footsteps as a boy, but couldn’t work in the fields long because of severe asthma. He discovered his love of drawing during those days that he was stuck in bed.
“I loved farming but just couldn’t do it. I kept having asthma attacks. Being asthmatic, I spent a lot of time inside. TV wasn’t as prevalent in the 1950s, so my mom would shove paper and pencil in my hand to entertain me.”
1. His first job was an assistant on The Tumbleweeds comic strip. After graduating from Ball State University in Indiana, Davis landed his first professional job in illustration as an assistant on the western-themed comic strip the Tumbleweeds. Davis learned the ins and outs of putting together a daily strip during his stint on the strip from 1969-78 while also launching his own comic strip, Gnorm Gnat.
2. Davis had Gnorm killed because people don’t like bugs. Gnorm Gnat ran for several years in Indiana’s The Pendleton Times, but failed to catch on. After failing to sell the comic strip to other newspapers Davis took the advice of one editor who told him, “Your art is good, your gags are great, but bugs—nobody can relate to bugs” to heart and ended the strip with Gnorm being stepped.
3. He once owned 25 cats. He only has one cat currently (Nermal) but at one time counted as many as 25 cats living on his farm when he was a child.
4. He developed Garfield off of his grandfather. He named his newly developed character after his grandfather whom he describes as having a “gruff exterior, but soft heart.” Davis told The Telegraph, there were already an abundance of dogs in comic strips at the time and Davis felt a cat would stand out more and be relatable to people.
“I thought if I could create a convincing cat I could say and do anything I wanted on the human condition,” he says.”Cats are anthropomorphised in art because they are so laid back that you automatically attribute human thoughts and feelings to them.”
5. Garfield Minus Garfield didn’t go unnoticed in his writing. Davis is well aware of the parody strip “Garfield Minus Garfield” and says it reminds him that “less is more.”
6. Charles Schultz helped Garfield physically evolve. In Garfield’s early days he mostly just sat on his butt and occasionally walked around on all fours — not that he necessarily moves much now either. Davis wanted Garfield to start standing upright more to take on more of a human persona, but was struggling with the illustration while working in animator Bill Melendez’s office when Peanuts Charles Schultz offered to help.
“He took my drawing, and said, ‘Here’s your problem, he has these little cat feet. Give him big human feet’,” recalls Davis. “So Charles Schulz drew the first standing Garfield. From then on Garfield walked on his back feet.”