6 ms·

Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.

Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product. And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like. Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this". The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers. I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.

rbanffy 5mo ago
> I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media. The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
- mapontosevenths 5mo ago
  The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
  - iamtedd 4mo ago
    Only men?
    - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
      Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line. More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped. Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
      - iamtedd 4mo ago
        There is a gender-indeterminate alternative: people. Using "man" to refer to all people stopped being popular last century.
        mapontosevenths 4mo ago
        Popularity and correctness are unrelated concepts. The word "Men" was gender neutral long before it became masculine, and Armstrong did not take "one giant leap for peoplekind".
PaulHoule 5mo ago
My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since. Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money. Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.
- cogman10 5mo ago
  Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once. But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas. I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
  - nemomarx 5mo ago
    the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters. Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.) I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.
evanelias 5mo ago
Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books. And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield
- kbenson 5mo ago
  Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
  - evanelias 5mo ago
    Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!
vintermann 5mo ago
That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip. Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here? To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising. It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.
- pseudohadamard 5mo ago
  > That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...
  - lproven 5mo ago
    > Zalgo Garfield Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.
    - vintermann 5mo ago
      Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner. So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).
Forgeties79 5mo ago
> He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this". In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.

rbanffy 5mo ago

> I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media. The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.

mapontosevenths 5mo ago
The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
- iamtedd 4mo ago
  Only men?
  - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
    Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line. More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped. Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
    - iamtedd 4mo ago
      There is a gender-indeterminate alternative: people. Using "man" to refer to all people stopped being popular last century.
      - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
        Popularity and correctness are unrelated concepts. The word "Men" was gender neutral long before it became masculine, and Armstrong did not take "one giant leap for peoplekind".

PaulHoule 5mo ago

My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since. Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money. Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.

cogman10 5mo ago
Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once. But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas. I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
- nemomarx 5mo ago
  the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters. Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.) I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.

evanelias 5mo ago

Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books. And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield

kbenson 5mo ago
Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
- evanelias 5mo ago
  Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!

vintermann 5mo ago

That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip. Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here? To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising. It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.

pseudohadamard 5mo ago
> That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...
- lproven 5mo ago
  > Zalgo Garfield Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.
  - vintermann 5mo ago
    Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner. So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).

Forgeties79 5mo ago

> He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this". In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.