Garfield

Garfield is the world's most widely read comic strip, created by Jim Davis featuring the cat Garfield, the less-than-brilliant pet dog Odie, and their socially inept owner Jon Arbuckle. The character is named after Davis's grandfather, James Garfield Davis, who was named after former U.S. president James Garfield.

Production and criticism

Like many comic strips, Garfield is not exclusively drawn and written by its creator. Jim Davis's company, Paws Inc., employs cartoonists and writers who do most of the work of scripting, drawing, and inking the strip, while Davis's work is usually confined to approving and signing the finished strip. Davis spends most of his time managing the business and merchandising aspects of Garfield. The strip is also deliberately written to be inoffensive, avoiding any social or political commentary such as that present in some of Garfield's contemporaries, such as Doonesbury, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes, and even Cathy. The characters and situations are constant, with no change or development for the past several years. While this is not unique to Garfield, as Calvin of the aforementioned Calvin and Hobbes and the children of Peanuts never grow up, other strips such as For Better or For Worse, Cathy, and Doonesbury maintain a continuity with characters who develop, age, and may even die as the strip proceeds.

Related Topics:
Merchandising - Doonesbury - Dilbert - Calvin and Hobbes - Cathy - Peanuts - For Better or For Worse

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Garfield's inoffensive, merchandising-oriented approach has been widely criticized by many commentators including Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, whose views against merchandising were explained at great detail in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Watterson, when asked for his opinion of fellow cartoonists, including Jim Davis, once tactfully described Garfield as "consistent". http://ignatz.brinkster.net/chonk.html Rather less tactfully, Maddox's The Best Page in the Universe describes Garfield as "the orange merchandising turd that creator Jim Davis pinches out every Sunday in newspapers around the world, traumatizing millions with his bland humor week after tragic week." http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=garfield_sucks According to these critics, the humor and potential artistry of the strip is intentionally sacrificed for commercial motives by recycling the same stock jokes, limiting the strip's potential in the long run.

Related Topics:
Bill Watterson - The Best Page in the Universe

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