Profiled: Jim Davis and 30+ years of Garfield

Alan Gardner June 28, 2011 1 minute 4 comments

Bob Harvey has a great interview with Jim Davis regarding his career doing Garfield. Bob provides a lot of insight into the PAWS Inc. organization and Jim’s role in his empire. Garfield appeared in papers 33 years ago last week.

As the Garfield empire grew, more and more of Davis’ time was devoted to the multiplicity of projects and products that the cat generated. Davis may be weary of drawing stripes on his lasagna-loving cat, but he hasn’t tired of creating the strip and overseeing the entertainment industry that’s grown up around it. He’s a very engaged creative director as well as chief executive officer of PAWS. I asked him if he sometimes wished the enterprise wasn’t quite so huge so he could devote more time to drawing.

“Yes,” he said, “but one reason I grew this pony tail is to remind myself that I’m an artist, not a businessman. But I still enjoy the work. I still do the comic strip. Nothing’s changed from that standpoint. I do get a thrill out of working on the other creative projects-television, even the product design, designing the dolls, working with the voices. What would Garfield say in this situation? It takes a lot of focus, but it’s still creating entertainment-creating humor, making people laugh. So I really enjoy two aspects. Doing the comic strip and the other truly creative stuff.”

Comments ⁴

Keith Brown

You mean all this time all I was missing was the pony tail?
I can do that.

John Read

That interview was done 13 years ago, by the way.

Rich Diesslin

Congrats on 33. Garfield is still a consistently funny and well drawn strip in my opinion. Hope it sees many more years of success.

John Platt

On it’s own quality threshold Garfield has never took a dip in qualtity unlike Peanuts which could have done so much better than the terriible’ Molly Volly/tennis/oh I ate too many cookies’ strips of the eighties. I could never understand how Peanuts actually got better when Schulz was older in the late nineties. Despite it’s critics Garfield is still one of the top strips around today, it has it’s own demographic and serves them well.

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