The Garfield Franchise Was Originally Meant to Focus on a Totally Different Character (2025)

Despite being the world's most syndicated comic, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, Garfield was originally meant to be very different, even following a different character in Jim Davis' original vision. The cynical, always hungry tabby has appeared on endless merchandise, starred in various movies and TV shows, and is instantly recognizable by fans across the world - however, he wasn't supposed to be the focus of his own comic.

Jim Davis' comic success didn't happen overnight, and he actually launched a totally different franchise before ever thinking up Garfield (more on that shortly.) However, even in the case of the lazy orange cat, Davis' original vision was a comic starring Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle. In fact, when Davis' strip first appeared in The Pendleton Times in 1976, it was titled Jon.

The difference wasn't just in the title - Jon focuses on Arbuckle's various misadventures, hanging out with close friend Lyman and trying unsuccessfully to find a date. Garfield was a side character who often didn't appear at all. Indeed, it took a moment of realization for Davis to understand that he needed to shift focus away from Jon and towards his soon-to-be-iconic cat.

While Davis was trying to treat Jon as the main character, Garfield always had a sarcastic comment that gave him the last word.

'Garfield' Was Meant to Be Jon Arbuckle's Comic

Tumbleweeds Creator Pointed Out Jim Davis Was Focusing on the Wrong Character

Jon ran from January 1976 to March 1978, but only kept its original name until 1977, when Davis renamed it Garfield. The strip was picked up for national syndication soon after and effectively relaunched, with Davis recreating several Jon gags with new art. In the run-up to the series' name change, Garfield began to hog the spotlight more and more, but it took a colleague's insight for Davis to realize this was because of the tabby's star power.

In a 2018 interview with Mental Floss, Davis admits that while he was trying to treat Jon as the main character, Garfield always had a sarcastic comment that gave him the last word. Davis recalls a conversation with T.K. Ryan (the creator of the comic strip Tumbleweeds) where he explained that every time he came up with a punchline, he also thought of Garfield's quick-witted response. Davis says:

I ran some early ideas at a local paper to see how I felt about it and I called the strip Jon. It was about him, but he had this wise cat who, every time, came back zinging him. He always had the great payoff. At the time, I worked for T.K. Ryan - the cartoonist for Tumbleweeds - and I showed it to him and told him how every time I got to the punch line the cat zings him. And T.K. said, 'Well, what does that tell you, Jim? The strip must be about the cat. Go with it.'

Garfield's immense fame - with hundreds of millions of readers across the world - makes it wild to think that the character was never even meant to be the star of his own comic. However, looking at Davis' original design for Garfield, it's clear the character needed time to evolve into his iconic (and incredibly marketable) modern form. Making Garfield's story even stranger, Davis never actually meant to redesign Garfield.

Becoming the Main Character Changed Garfield's Design

Davis Kept Changing Garfield to Overcome Artistic Challenges

In his original appearance, Garfield is far more feline, standing on four legs and with a less expressive face, including notably smaller eyes. Over the decades, Garfield became more stylized, becoming mostly bipedal and developing a far more expressive face. In a 2021 interview with Heritage Auctions, Davis noted that the changes to Garfield's design weren't about deliberately changing his look, but a byproduct of adjusting his design so he could believably perform new actions. Davis says:

That was never intentional. That just kind of happened over time to allow Garfield to do the things he needed to do. To better reach a pie on a high shelf, or better move around.

Garfield's more humanoid dimensions meant that he could interact with the world around him, and were directly inspired by Snoopy's design evolution over in Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Davis shares that Schulz actually sketched out suggested changes to Garfield when the two met by chance and Davis explained he was having trouble drawing Garfield dancing. Schulz revealed that Snoopy actually switched between two designs, with small back feet when he was sitting down and larger feet when he was standing on his back legs - a technique Davis happily adopted, saying, "From that day on he walked, and it was thanks to Charles Schulz."

As for Garfield's expressive face, that was actually down to the 1983 newsprint shortage. To make the most of the paper they had, newspapers printing Garfield shrank down their comic sections. Davis describes making Garfield's face bigger and also increasing the size of the text in the comic, partly because older readers were starting to complain they couldn't read it. Davis says:

I had to make the eyes bigger, and the mouth bigger, to get the expressions literally big enough so that people – older people, older readers – could see. I made the lettering larger too, because a lot of papers were shrinking the strips almost out of sight, and I was losing the expressions of the characters.

One of the joys of media franchises as old as Garfield that are still running today is seeing the surprising things that influenced their early life. In the case of Garfield, fans only have the orange cat they love because of economic issues in the '80s and a chance meeting between Davis and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. However, even then, Garfield's success only came about thanks to the trail blazed by Davis' original comic critter.

Garfield Wasn't Even Jim Davis' Second Choice as a Comic Star

Davis' First Comic Strip Followed an Insect Protagonist

Before Garfield, and before even Jon, Jim Davis' first professional comic was Gnorm Gnat - a newspaper strip about a sarcastic, fourth-wall-breaking bug. Preceding Jon in The Pendleton Times, Gnorm Gnat began publication in 1973, but wasn't picked up by other newspapers despite Davis' best efforts. Tonally, Gnorm Gnat is very similar to Garfield, and indeed many jokes from Davis' original comic made it into Garfield later with minor changes. One place where Gnorm Gnat is unique is basing gags on the character's size, with the strip's insects sometimes being randomly crushed by clueless humans.

Davis eventually concluded that if he was going to succeed in comics, he'd need to leave his insect characters behind, revealing in Garfield's Twentieth Anniversary Collection: 20 Years & Still Kicking! that one editor warned him that while the art and writing in Gnorm Gnat were both syndication-worthy, "nobody can relate to bugs!" While the later success of Gary Larson's insect-obsessed The Far Side would suggest this isn't totally true, Davis definitely struck gold by refocusing on Jon Arbuckle and his cat.

Indeed, Davis has championed Garfield's relatability as one of its biggest strengths in the past, pointing out that its everyday observations are designed to be funny to people all over the world - an inarguable success, given how successful the franchise has been with international readers. While Davis did include some details like Jon's job (cartoonist) and where the strip is set (Indiana) so that journalists wouldn't both him with those questions at a later date, he almost never references such specific details more than once, allowing readers to fill in the gaps with whatever they find most relatable. Davis told Mental Floss:

I would like for readers in Sydney, Australia to think that Garfield lives next door. Dealing with eating and sleeping, being a cat, Garfield is very universal. By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old. It gives me a lot more latitude for the humor for the situations.

Garfield is one of the most successful comic characters ever created, and yet there were so many moments in his evolution that could have turned out differently. Davis wanted to write and draw Gnorm Gnat way before his feline creation, and with Jon, he only envisioned Garfield as a background character. Even then, Garfield might have been unrecognizable if not for Davis running into Charles Schulz and asking for advice or being forced to adjust his comic to compensate for economic factors that were nothing to do with his creative vision. Thankfully, all these events came together in just the right way to give fans the Garfield they know and love.

Source: Scott Neumyer, Mental Floss; Robert Wilonsky, Heritage Auctions