Comic history Comic strips

Comic Strip Rarities: Garfield

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D. D. Degg December 1, 2024 1 minute 2 comments

Strangely, for such a popular comic strip that appears in thousands of newspapers and has scores of book collections published, previous little-known miscellany about Garfield continues to surface. A few years ago the pre-Garfield Jon strip surfaced.

Now another obscure set of Garfield comic strips are coming to the fat cat’s fandom.

About two years after Garfield’s June 19, 1978 debut, in mid-1980, Jim Davis and United Feature Syndicate distributed six Garfield comic strips for new subscribing newspapers to introduce readers to the comic strip characters. The six “new” strips were adaptations of previously published comics including the first one. And there was at least one other major difference.

Below are the six “introduction” strips, copyrighted 1980 and used to at least 1983, paired with the originals.

Above is the June 19, 1978 debut; below the introductory adaptation.

Above is the June 21, 1978 Garfield strip; below the introductory adaptation.

Above is the August 7, 1978 introduction of Lyman; below the introductory adaptation.

Followed on August 8, 1978 with Odie’s first appearance above; and the introductory adaptation below.

The above Garfield and Odie relationship from December 28, 1978 was chosen; and below the adaptation.

Finally, from August 26, 1978 is Garfield and lasagna; and below the sixth and last introductory adaptation.

The introductory strips here come from The Bellingham Herald and ran January 5 to January 10, 1981.

The vertical Garfield title is the newspaper’s layout and not from Davis or the syndicate.

It is obvious that in the two years since the originals ran the characters’ looks had changed so redrawing them is understandable, but why the four panels? Garfield was from the beginning a three panel strip with very rare exceptions – see the original August 7 shown above, and even then the first and second panel equals the individual width of panels two or three. I’ll guess that the syndicate decided to enable new newspapers to stack the introductory strips into a square if the editors decided to run them as special promos throughout the paper.