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?)
Today, the Garfield Holiday Collection was released on DVD exclusively at Walmart, with a digital version coming to iTunes and elsewhere on Nov. 11. To mark the occasion WIRED decided to pick Davis' brain about the legacy of Garfield in the Internet Age. Here's what we learned.
Garfield's owner and punching bag Jon Arbuckle has been dragging his feet into the 21st century. "Two months ago, I gave Jon a flatscreen TV," Davis says. "He agonized over that for a year. I took away his xylophone and gave him wireless ... Now he's texting. I mean, it took him 25 years to get a date with Liz. He's not a techie." Garfield, on the other hand, has been drawn digitally and published online for years. (Also, Davis lives in Indiana and his production assistants live in Virginia and Florida, which gives you an idea of how "techie" the back-end has to be.)
Davis says the shrinking number of print outlets hasn't put too much of a dent in his business. "The demise of the newspaper has been overblown a bit," he says. "It was the big over-leveraged papers that could no longer be supported by the advertisers, who'd been bought and sold so many times already. The family-owned papers, the small chains, they're still doing fine and are profitable, so they'll be around for a while." (Nevertheless, consider that this is the most syndicated print comic strip on Earth, so maybe take that with a grain of salt.)
Davis rather enjoys some of the parodies of his work, and notes really good appropriations give him great perspective on how fans view his nearly 40 years of comics. "Garfield Minus Garfield is, of course, one of my favorites," Davis says. "We actually worked with the young fellow [creator Dan Walsh] who did that; it was such a great concept. It was kind of funny—we called Dan, and the second we identified ourselves, he said, 'I'm so sorry. You want me to cease and desist, right?' We said, 'No, we want to collaborate on a book with you.' Dan wrote the forward for the book that came out in 2008."
Of course, this only applies to parodies that are actually clever. "The political ones are really more about the person writing it than it is [about Garfield]," he notes. "They use a familiar face to say something they wanted to say—you could have done it without using Garfield. But if they're not mean-spirited or trying to make a big profit off something that's in poor taste, we embrace it."
"[Garfield] was such a bad boy in 1978!" Davis says. "You know, he'd never sleep; he'd burp ... and then along came Bart Simpson. And then he was the bad boy. Then Beavis and Butthead were the bad boys. Then South Park, and they were really bad. So now Garfield is mom-approved." So if he seems tame nowadays, it's the times, not a suitable adaptation to more delicate sensibilities. "It's not that I sold out; it's that the whole market has shifted in front of [the comic] insofar as their sensitivity to that kind of material," he says. "I think part of the appeal is, you know, like with Peanuts, you always want to go back to see Snoopy on the doghouse. In such a changing world, [readers] want to know that some things stay the same, so I feel a responsibility to keep Garfield loving lasagna and hating Mondays; he's never going to go on a diet."
It might seem like writing jokes about Garfield's love of Italian food might get tedious, but it doesn't. "I talked to [comic artist and creator of Beetle Bailey] Mort Walker about that early on," Davis says. "One writer once likened gag-writing to 'walking into a dark closet, taking some gags off a shelf and leaving without knowing how big the closet really is.' 'You know what?' [Mort] said, 'It actually just gets easier.' And he's right. It gets easier and easier as you get to know your characters better. And the times change enough that you [always] have a ton of stuff to write about. If anything, writing [Garfield] is easier today than it was 30 years ago. The thing is to relax and have fun with it. I have fun writing stuff that people have fun reading, because you really cannot fool the reader—you have to be laughing yourself."
Davis isn't trepidatious about working with the new cats on the block. "In fact some of us, it's been great fun to write back and forth to each other, with some of the other cat creators," he says. "Pearls Before Swine and Garfield did a crossover strip a few weeks ago, and the Grumpy Cat people have a movie in development and inquired about Garfield making a cameo. We declined because of a conflict with another agreement, but we wished them well."
