Career
Prior to creating Garfield, Davis worked for a local advertising agency, and in 1969, he began assisting Tom Ryan's comic strip, Tumbleweeds. He then created a comic strip, Gnorm Gnat, that ran for five years in The Pendleton Times, an Indiana newspaper. When Davis attempted to sell it to a national comic strip syndicate, an editor told him, "Your art is good, your gags are great, but bugs—nobody can relate to bugs!"
On June 19, 1978, Garfield started syndication in 41 newspapers. Things were going well until the Chicago Sun-Times canceled the strip, prompting an outcry from readers. Garfield was reinstated and the strip quickly became the fastest selling comic strip in the world. Today it is syndicated in 2,580 newspapers and is read by approximately 263 million readers each day.
In the 1988-94 cartoon series Garfield and Friends, one episode ("Mystic Manor") has a scene of Garfield sliding down a fireman's pole in a haunted house, and Davis has, in briefs, himself drawing a cartoon.
In the 1980s, Davis created the barnyard slapstick comic strip U.S. Acres, featuring Orson the Pig. Outside the U.S., the strip was known as Orson's Farm. Davis also made a 2000-03 strip based on the toy Mr. Potato Head with Brett Koth.
In 2005, Davis appeared in the music video "Lazy Muncie", a video inspired by the Saturday Night Live video "Lazy Sunday". Long before that, in the 1980s, he appeared on the sitcom The Ted Knight Show as himself.
Davis founded the Professor Garfield Foundation to support children’s literacy.
Read more about this topic: Jim Davis (cartoonist)
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