Lasagna Nation

Seven years into his apprenticeship on the comic strip Tumbleweeds, adman turned cartoonist Jim Davis still wasn’t close to his dream of syndication. By 1976, he had learned how to ink backgrounds and time a gag, but his own strip, Gnorm Gnat, hadn’t gone any further than a local Indiana paper. His nonhuman protagonist was meant to ward off the controversy that Tumbleweeds’ cowboys-and-Indians premise raked in, but as one editor told him: “Bugs? Nobody can relate.”

Davis pulled his comic about the smarmy, squinty-eyed gnat that year, and filled the slot with a new strip called Jon. According to one of his colleagues, Davis’s goals were modest: “All he really wanted was enough money to buy beer and cigarettes.” Loosely based on his own life, it starred cartoonist Jon Arbuckle and his hulking, jowly beast of a cat, who assumed Gnorm’s bad attitude and dour squint. Although the cat was only marginally easier on the eyes, he instantly became the star of the strip. Yet again, Davis’s strip left the pages, only to return with a new name the next year. In 1978, Garfield debuted nationally in forty-one publications, and at thirty-two years old, Davis was finally on track to creating one of the biggest comic strips of all time.