Garfield the cat

A drawing I did of Garfield and Jon Arbuckle, after an inked drawing by Jim Davis, who at the time, 1987, was using art assistants and maybe also additional writers for his strip (don't know if he used any art assistants for the strip I was looking at for this drawing). Not a tracing, I laid open a copy of Garfield's 15th comic strip collection published March 1988 (which I've had since 88, 89, one of those years, maybe 1990) and looked at a panel from a strip and drew it much larger size.                                     I loved the Garfield comic strip years before (since 84? 83?) the debut of the cartoon show Garfield and Friends in 1988 (on CBS Saturday mornings), which is one of my favorite cartoons. Incidentally (because I didn't have that in mind when I chose this book, I have many Garfield strip collections), most of the Garfield Quickie cartoons in season 1 and 2 of Garfield and Friends were based on Sunday strips from Garfield's 15th book, titled Garfield World-wide. The reason probably was, Garfield's 15th book was the latest one out when Garfield and Friends was debuting, and maybe also the title of the 15th book was attractive to the guys who were about to have Garfield go worldwide in his own regular TV cartoon series (there were some one-shot Garfield cartoon specials on Tv before the regular series I believe).

Of course, Garfield already had gone worldwide with the success of the newspaper strip and strip collections and merchandise years before 1988 and the debut of Garfield and Friends, but the cartoon was also great and surely brought Garfield many new fans, and furthered his popularity among people like me who already liked the strip years before the cartoon came out.