49 Fun Facts About Garfield

Jim Davis made his star a cat after noticing the comics pages were crowded with which animals?

Dogs: Davis saw Snoopy, Marmaduke and Fred Basset thriving and reasoned that if dog lovers liked dog strips, cat lovers would want a cat of their own.

What Garfield novelty items kept washing up on beaches in Brittany, France, for more than 30 years?

Telephones: the bright orange phones spilled from a shipping container lost in a storm in the early 1980s, which was only found in 2019, wedged in a sea cave.

Which comic strip about insects did Jim Davis draw before Garfield, without ever finding a syndicate?

Gnorm Gnat: after years of rejections for his bugs, Davis shelved the strip, took a long hard look at what was selling on the comics page and came back with a cat.

Rather than a US president, Garfield the cat is named after which relative of creator Jim Davis?

His grandfather: Davis remembered James A. Garfield Davis as 'a large, cantankerous man', and the cat got his temper along with his name.

Jim Davis took Jon Arbuckle's surname, as an inside joke, from an old commercial for what?

Coffee: the ad traded on the name of John Arbuckle, a 19th-century tycoon who got rich by selling roasted beans in sealed packages instead of loose from the barrel.

Odie first joined the Garfield strip as the pet of which character, a roommate of Jon's who later vanished?

Lyman: Jim Davis brought him in so Jon had someone to talk to, then dropped him once the pets could carry the jokes, and the dog simply stayed on.

Garfield's official birthday is June 19, the anniversary of what?

The strip's national debut: by June 19, 1978 the cat had already spent two years in a small Indiana weekly, in a strip named after his owner.

What happened after the Chicago Sun-Times dropped Garfield three months into its run?

Readers got it reinstated: the paper relented, and within four years seven Garfield books sat on the New York Times bestseller list at once.

Which fellow cartoonist, a mentor to Jim Davis, redrew Garfield's feet so the cat could stand on his hind legs?

Charles Schulz: he was working next door when Davis couldn't make the cat dance for his first TV special, so he sketched in bigger back feet, the trick that lets Snoopy stand.

In the late 1980s, millions of plush Garfields with suction-cup paws were stuck where?

On car windows: the suction cups were a factory mistake, because Jim Davis had asked for Velcro so the toy could cling to curtains, and he never expected cars.

What is Garfield's favourite food?

Lasagna: the taste is Jim Davis's own, and he likes to point out that he and his cat both love the dish and both refuse to go jogging.

Which childhood illness kept farm boy Jim Davis indoors, where he passed the time by drawing?

Asthma: bad bouts kept him in bed and away from the farm chores, so he drew to fill the hours, with some 25 barn cats around the place for inspiration.

Which other orange comic-strip cat, created by George Gately, reached newspapers five years before Garfield?

Heathcliff: George Gately's troublemaking tomcat first appeared in 1973, yet it was the newcomer Garfield whose fame went on to eclipse his.

Which annoyingly cute kitten does Garfield keep trying to mail to Abu Dhabi?

Nermal: the self-proclaimed 'world's cutest kitten' delights in needling Garfield about his age and looks, which is why he keeps ending up boxed and addressed overseas.

In Garfield, what is Pooky?

Garfield's teddy bear: he found Pooky stuffed in a drawer a few months into the strip, and the bear has been his closest confidant ever since.

What is Jon Arbuckle's profession?

Cartoonist: Jon is Jim Davis's pen-and-ink alter ego, a farm boy turned artist, and he announces the job himself in the very first strip.

What is the name of the veterinarian Jon spent decades trying to date?

Dr. Liz Wilson: after almost three decades of brush-offs, she finally admitted in a 2006 storyline that she had feelings for Jon, and the two have been a couple ever since.

What is the nickname of Jon Arbuckle's younger brother, who works on the family farm?

Doc Boy: Jim Davis took the nickname from his own younger brother Dave, known as Doc, who grew up beside him on the family's Indiana farm.

What happens to Garfield in a bleak week of strips that ran just before Halloween in 1989?

Wakes in an abandoned house: Jim Davis, bored of ghosts and spiders, went for what he calls the biggest fear of all, being totally alone, and alarmed his own editors.

Jim Davis says his own grasp of which subject 'isn't strong', one reason Garfield has always steered clear of it?

Politics: Davis kept topical and country-specific jokes out from the very start, so that a gag about a fat cat and his dinner would work anywhere and never date.

Garfield at Large, which topped the New York Times bestseller list in 1980, was the first what?

Collection of Garfield strips: its long run at number one brought the producers of the Peanuts TV specials to Jim Davis's door, and the cat was on CBS two years later.

Which actor voiced Garfield in every CBS TV special and throughout Garfield and Friends?

Lorenzo Music: after hundreds of auditions Jim Davis heard his sleepy drawl, already known as the unseen doorman Carlton on Rhoda, and said almost at once, 'That's the one.'

Which soul singer of 'You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine' sang on Garfield's early TV specials?

Lou Rawls: the first special opens with Garfield dancing to Rawls's theme song, the very number whose choreography had forced a redesign of the cat's feet.

Which was the first Garfield TV special, aired on CBS in October 1982?

Here Comes Garfield: for all its breezy title, the story sends Odie to the pound to be put down at dawn, and Garfield has to break him out.

Garfield and Friends also adapted which other Jim Davis strip?

U.S. Acres: the barnyard strip folded in newspapers in 1989 after only three years, yet its pig, rooster and duck stayed on Saturday-morning TV beside Garfield for years afterwards.

In the first Garfield strip, Jon tells readers 'Our only thought is to entertain you'; what is Garfield's own thought?

Feed me: Jim Davis has twice named that 1978 debut among his favourite strips, and it set the pattern for everything after, with Jon playing host while the cat thinks of his stomach.

Who voices Garfield in the 2004 and 2006 live-action films?

Bill Murray: by his own account he took the job after misreading screenwriter Joel Cohen's name as Joel Coen of the Coen brothers, and only caught on at the recording session.

Who played Jon Arbuckle in Garfield: The Movie?

Breckin Meyer: his co-star was never on set, since the film's Garfield was a computer creation added afterwards, while Odie and the other animals were played by real ones.

Which actress played the veterinarian Jon falls for in the two live-action Garfield films?

Jennifer Love Hewitt: her vet is the reason Odie joins the household, since Jon, too smitten to say no, agrees to adopt the pup she is trying to rehome.

Which villain steals Odie in Garfield: The Movie, the 2004 live-action film?

Happy Chapman: the smarmy morning-show host, played by Stephen Tobolowsky, sees Odie dance and snatches him as his ticket to network stardom.

In Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, the gang travels to which country?

The United Kingdom: the title winks at Dickens, but the plot is Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, with Garfield trading places with a pampered lookalike who has inherited a castle.

Who voices Garfield in the 2024 animated feature The Garfield Movie?

Chris Pratt: director Mark Dindal had imagined Pratt's own speaking voice coming out of the cat for years, so he plays Garfield without putting on a voice at all.

In The Garfield Movie, why had Garfield's father really left him alone in an alley as a kitten?

To find food: Vic returned to see the kitten being fed by Jon in an Italian restaurant across the street, and let the stranger who could look after him take him home.

Which Pulp Fiction star voices Garfield's father, Vic, in The Garfield Movie (2024)?

Samuel L. Jackson: Vic is a character invented for the film, a street cat who drags his pampered son out of the house and into a milk heist.

How did Jim Davis react to Garfield Minus Garfield, the webcomic that erases his cat?

Called it inspired: Davis thanked creator Dan Walsh for showing him another side of the strip, and his own publisher put out a Garfield Minus Garfield book with both their names on it.

Which company did Jim Davis found in 1981 to handle Garfield's licensing?

Paws, Inc.: the merchandise outgrew the strip so fast that by 1994 the company could buy Garfield outright from his syndicate, for a reported $15 to 20 million.

Which children's TV brand took charge of Garfield after its parent company, Viacom, bought the franchise in 2019?

Nickelodeon: the deal put the cat beside SpongeBob and the Ninja Turtles and into the channel's crossover fighting games, years before any new cartoon appeared.

Which Indiana university, Jim Davis's alma mater, helped him launch the free Professor Garfield learning website in 2005?

Ball State: Davis, who studied art and business there, built the site after years of hearing from parents and teachers that the strip had kick-started a child's interest in reading.

What about Garfield sparked a 2017 online edit war that Jim Davis himself finally settled?

His gender: a satirist dug up Davis's old remark that the cat is 'not really male or female', editors flipped the entry back and forth for 60 hours, and Davis finally ruled that Garfield is male.

In the 1984 book Garfield: His 9 Lives, where is the cat's ninth life set?

Outer space: the lives run from a Stone Age cave cat to a starship commander, each drawn in a different style, and the everyday Garfield of the strip turns out to be only number eight.

Which console was a 1984 Garfield game made for, only to be shelved when the company's new owners balked at the royalties?

Atari 2600: the game had reached Atari's 1984 catalogue when the Tramiel family took over a company hit by the video game crash and refused to pay what the cat cost.

Which Garfield racing game did the French publisher Anuman Interactive release in 2013?

Garfield Kart: Nintendo Life shrugged it off as Mario Kart by numbers, yet it outlasted its critics, earning a 2019 follow-up, Furious Racing, and a full sequel in 2025.

Which Gulf city was the 2018 test market for GarfieldEATS, a delivery-only Garfield restaurant run through an app?

Dubai: after a year there its founder took the app to Toronto, sending out Garfield-shaped pizza and 'Garfuccinos' by hybrid car and electric scooter.

Which budget lodging chain named Garfield its first 'Chief Pet Officer' in April 2024?

Motel 6: the chain has let pets stay free for more than 60 years, so it handed the cat the title and fitted out orange, cat-towered rooms to mark The Garfield Movie.

What kind of trip are Garfield, Jon and Odie on when an escaped panther appears in the special Garfield in the Rough?

A camping trip: Jon refuses to pack up even after the radio warns of the panther, and it falls to the cowardly cat to save him and Odie.

Jim Davis grew up in Fairmount, Indiana, a farm town better known as the boyhood home of which film star?

James Dean: both men grew up on farms outside town and went to its high school, and the local museum now honours the rebel and the cat's creator under one roof.

Which New Girl actor was announced in March 2026 as the voice of Garfield in a new Paramount+ animated series?

Lamorne Morris: the series had been promised when the franchise changed hands in 2019 and took seven years to be ordered, and his New Girl character Winston, aptly, doted on a cat of his own.

Only Jim Davis's name appears on Garfield, but who has done most of the actual drawing since the late 1990s?

His studio assistants: Davis writes the gags and roughs them out for a few days each month, then long-serving artists such as Brett Koth and Gary Barker turn them into finished strips.

What is the name of Garfield's girlfriend, a pink cat?

Arlene: she is one of the few characters who can out-joke Garfield at his own expense, and for years he hit back by mocking the gap between her front teeth.