June 19: On This Day in World History … briefly
The lovable cartoon character 'Garfield' is the holder of the Guinness World Record for the world's most widely syndicated comic strip.
1978: ‘Garfield’ makes his debut
Garfield is an American comic created by Jim Davis. Published since 1978, it chronicles the life of the title character, Garfield, the cat; Jon Arbuckle, the human; and Odie, the dog. As of 2013, it was syndicated in roughly 2 580 newspapers and journals, and held the Guinness World Record for being the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip.
Though this is rarely mentioned in print, Garfield is set in Muncie, Indiana, the home of Jim Davis, according to the television special ‘Happy Birthday, Garfield’. Common themes in the strip include Garfield’s laziness, obsessive eating, coffee, and disdain of Mondays and diets.
The strip’s focus is mostly on the interactions among Garfield, Jon, and Odie, but other recurring minor characters appear as well. Originally created with the intentions to ‘come up with a good, marketable character’, Garfield has spawned merchandise earning $750 million to $1 billion annually.
In addition to the various merchandise and commercial tie-ins, the strip has spawned several animated television specials, two animated television series, two theatrical feature-length live-action/CGI animated films, and three fully CGI animated direct-to-video movies.
Part of the strip’s broad pop cultural appeal is due to its lack of social or political commentary; though this was Davis’s original intention, he also admitted that his ‘grasp of politics isn’t strong,’ joking that, for many years, he thought ‘OPEC was a denture adhesive’.
Davis attracted criticism from the mainstream media for a Garfield strip in which the last panel appeared to be a negative reference to Veterans Day that appeared in newspapers on November 11, 2010. In the strip, a spider who is about to be squashed by Garfield boasts that if he is squished, he will get a holiday in his remembrance. The next panel shows a classroom of spiders in which a teacher asks the students why spiders celebrate ‘National Stupid Day,’ implying that the spider was squished. Davis quickly apologised for the poorly timed comic strip, saying it had been written a year in advance and that both his brother and son were veterans.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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