Collection Garfield

Garfield has been running since 1978 and holds the world record for the most widely syndicated comic strip in history. Jim Davis has been open that this was partly a business decision - he studied what sold and built a cat around it.

It works because the cat is honest. Garfield is lazy, greedy, unkind to Odie and openly contemptuous of Mondays, and the strip never asks you to find him admirable. There's something restful about a character with no ambition to improve.

Jon Arbuckle is the strip's quiet tragedy. A man whose social life is so poor that his cat pities him, drawn for four decades without ever quite recovering.

The strip has also produced an unusual amount of internet culture - remixes that remove Garfield's speech, edits that make it existential, and a fandom that treats it as found poetry.

This collection covers Garfield, Jon, Odie and the lasagna.