Garfield a Career on the Beach

Black text with the image of Garfield the cat laying on a beach under an umbrella with a drink.

Garfield, the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world since 2002, was first published in 1978. Cartoonist Jim Davis decided to focus his comic on a cat to fill what he saw as a hole in the market. Davis was a business major at Ball State and worked in advertising, and always acutely managed Garfield as a brand as much as a comic. He recognized the marketability of animal characters and noticed that there were many popular cartoon dogs, but no cats. So he created Garfield, naming him after his grandfather John Garfield Davis, a man Davis said had "a gruff exterior but a soft heart."