Garfield: The Meme, The Myth, The Lasagna

>> PAYTON: I've lived in Indiana long enough to get to know some of its most famous fictional characters.

Leslie Knope, Bucky Barnes, Kathryn Janeway, Bobby Knight.

But there is one that towers above the rest.

One that when I started "Flyover Culture," I knew I just had to cover.

It's Garfield time!

♪ >> PAYTON: Friends and folks, welcome to "Flyover Culture."

I'm Payton Knobeloch, and I'm up here in Muncie, Indiana, the home of Garfield, to answer what I think is probably your first big question: Why Garfield?

On paper, he's an innocuous enough character.

Loves lasagna and sleeping, hates Mondays and exercise.

Who doesn't?

But just under the surface lies an absolute titan of popular culture.

At its peak in the mid-2000s, the strip was syndicated in 2600 daily newspapers, and merchandising brings in anywhere between $750 million and $1 billion every year.

Oh, and there's also one of the strangest Internet followings you can think of.

But why, though?

Why is this cat, that's the star of what's generally a pretty inoffensive newspaper comic strip, so massive?

To really get a handle on this thing, I knew I needed help.

And there was just one person on the Internet I knew I had to talk to.

Can I refer to you as a Garfield historian?

Is that apropos?

>> When I first added that to my Twitter profile, it was entirely a joke.

[ Laughter ] >> Because I had done, like, one video and it was very, like, Wikipedia level, but I think by this point, I have officially earned the title.

>> PAYTON: That's Quinton Hoover, the person behind the channel Quinton Reviews.

If you need a nearly five-hour iCarly retrospective or the YouTube series about YouTube, "Fallen Titan," he's your guy.

But he's also one of the biggest Garfield fans on the platform.

On his trip to Indiana last year, he managed to restore a good chunk of "Jon," Jim Davis' comic that was basically Garfield before Garfield.

>> You have those few years where you are really, really into Garfield.

You go to the website.

You get a bunch of plushies, and you get into middle school, you get into high school, and you kind of grow out of it.

And then, you know, when you are a little bit older, you kind of want to revisit the character, either in an ironic way, or because you realized that was honestly, like, a really positive time in your life, and it's nice to be reminded of that kind of stuff.

>> PAYTON: But before there was Garfield or Jon, there was Jim.

Jim Davis was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1945, and grew up in Fairmount on a cow farm.

Davis got his first bit of comics work when he was just in high school.

>> The first newspaper comic he ever published was for his senior newspaper.

A school newspaper.

We don't have any of those, because no one saved the school newspaper from 1963 at Fairmount High School, a building which has since collapsed.

But we do have his senior yearbook, where he also did a bunch of doodles of the same characters.

He drew in one of the doodles a cat sitting on a fence, which in my eyes is a very iconic Garfield thing.

Oh, even back when he was, you know, 18, 1963, he was -- he was still drawing cats sitting on fences.

>> PAYTON: Davis attended Ball State in Muncie, and he got work assisting on Tom K. Ryan's strip "Tumbleweeds" in 1969.

That was his springboard for creating his own series, "Gnorm Gnat," which ran in The "Pendleton Times" in Pendleton, Indiana, from 1973 to 1975.

"Gnorm Gnat" followed a cast of bugs and was a typical gag-a-day strip, but it didn't quite connect with people.

So just a few weeks after "Gnorm Gnat" ended, Davis launched a new strip called "Jon" in early 1976, also in the "Pendleton Times."

For as much as "Jon" was the proto-Garfield, the strip wasn't archived well and was thought to be lost to time, until Quinton did some archival work in 2019 and recovered high-quality scans of the comic.

>> You got to give a lot of credit to our public library system, and specifically the librarian at the Pendleton Public Library, who really hooked me up with some of that info.

I did drive down an archival of that work myself, but up to that point, anything I had, I had because she printed it out, scanned it in, and then emailed it to me.

>> PAYTON: "Gnorm Gnat" and "Jon" share a lot of DNA with later Garfield strips, and not just because of some character names.

>> When you go through "Gnorm Gnat" and "Jon," though, there are so many recycled jokes.

I think he was trying to perfect the craft of that first year of comics.

And perhaps that's why he hasn't republished all that material, because I feel like he really does believe that, you know, 1978 Garfield is the way to get into the comic, and that these prototype, like sketchy archetypal versions, are perhaps not the best introduction.

>> PAYTON: "Jon" ran for over a year and was later retitled "Garfield," and the strip was finally picked up for syndication in 1978.

And on June 19th, 1978, Jon Arbuckle and his cat Garfield were reintroduced to the world.

It's one thing to read online, you know, Garfield was a big hit.

Now it makes millions every year.

But I wanted to learn what people thought of it at the time.

So I talked to Brian Walker.

Brian wears a lot of hats.

Historian, museum curator, Eisner-nominated author, and cartoonist.

He's also the son of Mort Walker, creator of "Beetle Bailey" and "Hi and Lois."

>> Jim Davis was a big fan of my dad's work.

I'm thinking it must have been around '77 maybe, Jim Davis came to New York to -- I think to sort of finalize the contract for Garfield.

And so he came out to Connecticut to visit, and he just eagerly showed my father these drawings of -- of his new strip, you know, which was Garfield.

And I was kind of looking over my father's shoulder, looking at them.

And, you know, Jim left and so I said, so what did you think of that?

My father said, I don't know.

The cat is kind of ugly, isn't it, you know?

He kind of got a little rounder and cuter as time went on, but, you know, if you go back and look at those early strips, it's like what is that thing, you know?

>> PAYTON: The strip really connected with people.

>> I think the simplicity of it.

Not only, you know, that sort of very bold way that the drawing stands out in the newspaper page.

He said right from the beginning, you are going to stick with basically themes like eating and sleeping, and that's about it, you know?

It's pretty accessible.

It's pretty universal, I think.

>> It's easy for people who visit comics once a year, once every five years, to feel like that there's no -- there's no change or there's no adjustment of the status quo, but I feel like if you have really stay tuned in, there's definitely an evolution to the story that goes on in the comics.

Because, I mean, like I said earlier, the basic story at the start of the comic was that Jon was this extremely lonely cartoonist bachelor.

Perhaps, you know, Jon was like a mean-spirited caricature of that aspect of himself.

>> PAYTON: And the strip still continues to connect with people 43 years on.

Granted, with a much, much larger staff of artists and assistants.

That's thanks to Paws, Inc., the company Davis launched in 1981 to handle licensing on the character.

And there is a lot for them to handle!

It's easy to look around the Garf-scape now and think the character has much more presence as a brand and as merchandise than as a comics character.

I don't think anyone would blame you.

There's the toys, the clothing, the plushies, that weird pizza chain.

Licensed Garfield stuff is inescapable now, but it wasn't always that way.

As the famous quote goes, Garfield merchandising is like falling asleep.

Slowly, and then all at once.

>> He started with the books.

When that book format, you know, with the Garfield book format was a new innovation at the time, horizontal rather than vertical.

And those books, of course, became best sellers.

And then he moved in from one category to the next, maybe greeting cards or something.

It wasn't until quite a few years in that he really got into adapting it to animation, and apparel, and all of these other categories.

So he took it one step at a time, to make sure that it was sort of a logical progression from one thing to the next.

And I think that's -- I know that he studied what Schulz did with Snoopy.

>> PAYTON: The books were a great way to appeal to young kids, who last I checked, aren't great about staying on top of their local newspaper subscriptions.

>> You know, he's a legitimate cartoonist.

He's also, you know, a very good businessman.

I mean, I think my father was good at running his own little sort of cottage industry, but Jim is on another level.

And a lot of it is quality control too.

You know, the product -- all the products that they released were well-made and well-designed and they looked on model like they should.

>> PAYTON: The most recent big money move came in 2019 when Viacom bought Paws, Inc. and the rights to Garfield for an undisclosed -- probably big -- amount.

The Paws, Inc., building in Muncie was also sold, although, most of the team at that point had already gone remote.

And now a new Garfield show is in development at Nickelodeon.

>> I do think that Jim is unique in that he is really good at the business side of things, more so than most cartoonists who are -- the creative part of it is really what they do.

A lot of them are bad businessmen.

[ Laughter ] I mean, like, there's a lot of cartoonists I know who are notoriously undisciplined because, you know, you -- you are basically your own boss.

>> People disagree with me on this.

There are people who think that, like, Jim Davis never had any creative bone in his body, he was never artistic at all.

And, you know, they have their right to be wrong about everything.

>> PAYTON: [ Sigh ] Okay.

You can do this, Payton.

It's time to talk about the memes.

♪ >> PAYTON: Spend enough time in any corner of the Internet, and you will see some content.

For Garfield, that ranges from innocuous nonsense to Eldritch Horror to stuff that would get me fired if I put it on a video.

On one end, you have got clever fan are creations like Garfield minus Garfield or Gale Galligan's Jon.

Or artist Olly Moss' whole Twitter thing.

On the other, is fan art and videos full of sex and violence and anything else meant to shock and disturb.

And then on a completely other end, Garfield has been adopted as a symbol of the far left.

You get yours, Garfield.

I asked Dr. Paul Kohl at Loras College why he thinks that is.

If you haven't had the chance to force a college professor to look at Garfield memes, I highly recommend it.

>> Might be the simplicity of the character.

So, I mean, the simplicity of the design, but also the simplicity of the strips and the -- the concept behind it.

I think Garfield maybe as a blank slate in which people can put any kind of idea into it.

So Garfield can be a nice fluffy, you know, kitty cat character for some people, and this -- or this sarcastic, you know, mean cat to other people prefer him to be that.

And so it allows people to put their own stamp on him.

>> I feel like there's a specific mathematical calculation as per what becomes extremely meme-able.

I think it has to be something that's extremely present during their youth, in the minds of a lot of people, but not the kind of thing they would talk about every day.

And the kind of thing that probably will come back some day, but for most people it was, like, a forgotten shared memory.

It's partially because the franchise has been kind of lacking from a new TV special or a new movie or a new TV show for quite a while.

But I guess I have such a nostalgic for that early Garfield.com earnestness about how we interacted with that material, that I just get bored with people who want to be in the Garfield fandom only as a joke.

>> Though I guess he was most likely put forth as -- as a bad cat, but I think that that's kind of been taken to extremes in some -- in some cases, thinking about the -- kind of Lovecraft influence, Monster -- Monster Garfield that I saw.

>> There's two avenues.

Either you become so ironic about it that you become irony poisoned, or eventually, you just completely and utterly drop the irony entirely, and you are just, like, you know what, Garfield is pretty cool.

Now, I can't be this deep into all of it to the point that I have, like, a 60-pound Garfield plush.

It's one the rarest Garfield collectibles in the world.

And then when people come over and see it, I'm like, oh, but I'm joking.

>> PAYTON: I was curious what Jim Davis thought about all this.

He told Vice in 2019: >> PAYTON: Garfield is so many different things to so many different people, beloved childhood friend, capitalistic icon, Antifa super soldier, and as Dr. Kohl told me, there probably won't be another comic strip character like him.

>> The rise of the Internet or the diaspora of content that we have, that there's so many, you know, channels on television, there's so many alternative types of entertainment that are out there, that you are never going to see something as centralized as a Garfield again because it was just a product as much of the times as of the artistry that went into -- went into it.

>> PAYTON: And that's what brought me up here to Muncie to see Garfield's place in his own hometown.

>> In Muncie, a Garfield for a time waned in popularity.

However, Garfield's back, I'm happy to tell you.

We are showcasing through social media Garfield statutes that are throughout the -- throughout the town.

We have a Garfield trail that we're updating.

We are encouraging businesses and nonprofits who have Garfield from -- Garfield statues from days gone by, to move them to a public location so people can check off that Garfield, and we're getting a lot of -- we're getting a lot of positive feedback.

I think the resurgence of Garfield has really infused a lot of life and energy back into the community.

Garfield has really kind of become a symbol of Muncie unintentionally.

>> PAYTON: At the risk of sounding like a doofus -- we both know I am -- I started this project hoping to answer the question: What do we do with all of this?

How do we think about a character that's so big and sprawling and so far removed from its origins?

Well, I think you think about Garfield however you want.

Whatever Garfield means to you is what Garfield means to you.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to follow his example and go take a nap.

Who's got my Pooky?

♪ >> PAYTON: Hey, thanks so much for watching.

I know this was a weird one, but I hope you got something out of it.

I'm curious what the character means to you.

Was he something you grew up with, something you never really got into, or are you just praying you never have to visit the Garfield subreddit?

Let me know in the comments.

And a huge thank you to Brian Walker, Quinton Hoover, Dr. Paul Kohl and Dale Basham at the Muncie Visitors Bureau for all of their time and effort.

Thanks, and I will see you for the next one.