[CAT] "Jim Davis on Garfield’s Influence in the Age of the Internet Cat"

[rfmcdonald]

Back in 2010, I shared the below picture of a Garfield-themed children's ride.

The sight of this children's ride in the Yonge Eglinton Centre complex in midtown Toronto keeps Garfield in my mind. Yes, the Jon Davis cartoon of the moody fat orange cat lacks the political edge of Doonesbury, say, but so what? All Garfield has to do is be funny, and he still is, even after thirty years. (Garfield and Friends ranks alongside the Smurfs as my favourite cartoon show.) So: to Garfield!

Devon Maloney has done an interview at Wired of Jim Davis, the cartoonist who created Garfield in 1978 and has since shepherded the character and his universe to fame. How did he do it? Davis has useful insights on the subject of Internet fame and cats.

We like to think that cats really lucked out with the whole Internet thing. Before kitteh memes became lingua franca of the web, cat people were a relative minority and the hijinks of any individual animal were largely just enjoyed by their owners. Now, thanks to the likes of bonsai kittens and I Can Has Cheezburger, cattitude is a huge deal. It seems it doesn’t matter what kind of meme it is, if there’s play on the feline take-it-or-leave-it approach then it’s a hit. That would make it easy to assume the Internet has been a surprising PR boon for the brand of humor cats bring to the table.

In actuality, though, we should have seen it coming—Jim Davis certainly did.

As the father of one of the most Internet-friendly pre-Internet felines of all time—Garfield—he’s been getting LOLs out of cat jokes for more than 35 years. Created in 1978, his comic’s namesake has been guided by every tenet that makes cats so viral on the World Wide Web. He’s pudgy and eats people food. He ignores his dopey owner and torments the idiot dog with whom he’s forced to share a home. He also makes jokes about hating Mondays. Grumpy Who?

“Thematically, [Garfield] deals with things that everyone can identify with,” Davis says. “I purposely avoided sociopolitical comment simply because not everybody can identify with it, in other cultures as well. And if it was so timely, 30 years from now, people wouldn’t understand it, either … It’s more important to have a body of work resonate with the reader than it is to have an individual gag [resonate].”

Still, chances are you haven’t read a Garfield comic strip in a newspaper since you got your first email address. Although the Garfield empire is still going strong in print—new strips continue to appear in 2,100 newspapers worldwide—almost all his notoriety has shifted online, from daily strips that come out digitally to fan spins on Davis’ decades worth of three- and four-panel cat jokes. (Of course we mean Garfield Minus Garfield, what else would we be talking about?)