Living: Those Catty Cartoonists

When confronted with one of his father’s drawings, Alex W Davis, 2, pointed and said, “Snoopy.” Although he failed to identify the fat and sassy Garfield, the toddler was eerily on target in another respect. His dad, Jim Davis, 36, who created Garfield, always dreamed of becoming the next Charles Schulz. Davis wanted to pen a cartoon animal as captivating and popular as Schulz’s canine flying ace and his pals in the Peanuts comic strip. That fantasy is fast approaching fact.

Currently, some 250 books about cats are offered by publishers, but four cartoonists—not novelists, poets or pet-expert authors—dominate feline literature. Davis, whose books are compiled from daily comic strips running in 850 newspapers, is the most successful of the group. In fact, like superstrips Blondie, Peanuts and Beetle Bailey, Garfield is expected to appear in 1,000 newspapers by next spring. This is an amazing achievement—it has been only 3 years since the sly and always hungry feline burst full-grown from the head and hand of Davis. This hero is a cat who is both thorny and funny, a rogue who somehow never crosses the line into villainy. His views veer 180° from Snoopy’s gentle romanticism. “Spring is here,” Garfield observes. “Big, fat, hairy deal.”

Garfield inhabits a kitchen apocalypse of shredded poultry and scarred humans. Garfield prefers pasta to Purina, pugilism to purring. Although he jeers at mental and physical exercise, his creator is charged with energy. The tall, thin, blond and balding Davis gets to work in his ranch-style studio near Muncie, Ind., by 6:30 most mornings He draws for eleven hours a day and then manages to go on to racquetball, chess and reading self-improvement books. “You know,” he says, “things like So You Want to Be a Brain Surgeon.” His early career probably should have included Do You Want to Be a Cartoonist? Raised on an Indiana farm, Davis grew up with 25 cats and memories of his burly, cantankerous grandfather, John Garfield Davis. The elder Davis supplied both name and temperament for his grandson’s ungrateful creation.

Garfield was rejected by two syndicates (King Features and Chicago Tribune-New York News) before United Feature signed Davis to a contract in 1978. Not everyone loved his disreputable feline. Editors in Chicago, Salt Lake City and Little Rock, Ark., canceled the strip after test runs. But irate readers forced all three papers to reinstate it. ‘Way down deep, we’re all motivated by the same urges,” says Davis. “Cats have the courage to live by them—that’s what Garfield is all about.”

Garfield products, books and the strip have grossed over $15 million already this year (the royalty percentage is split fifty-fifty with United Feature). To coordinate Garfield spinoffs, Davis founded Paws, Inc. Garfield’s poultry-stuffed grin now adorns pottery, linen, stationery, luggage, maternity clothing, jewelry, beer steins, toothbrush holders, pillows, chimney stockings, diaries, catnip bags, wastebaskets and slumberbags. Garfield’s visage is even silk-screened on women’s panties. Many of the items carry historic Garfield utterings like, “I never met a lasagna I didn’t like”; or “Cats don’t ask. Cats take”; or “You know it’s Monday when you find sharks circling in your water bowl.”

Garfield and his tart tongue soon will enter American living rooms. An animated Garfield television special will air on CBS in 1982. The script calls for action, adventure and a G-rated love scene: Garfield romances a lasagna. “I’d tell you how the affair ends,” Davis says, “but it’s not a pretty sight.”

A frugal millionaire, Davis recently traded in his 1962 Chevrolet and bought a 1979 Lincoln Continental with 30,000 miles on it. “I still couldn’t bring myself to get a new one,” he says. Some day he may even break down and own a dog—Davis’ wife is allergic to cats.

Davis’ spiritual ancestor in the cat cartoon game is Bernard Kliban, 46. He started all the madness. Back in 1975, Kliban, a very private Marin County, Calif., comic artist who once owned four felines and lost three of them in a divorce settlement, published Cat, an album of tiger-striped, round-eyed feline meatloaves. Originally a portfolio of cat drawings done to amuse himself, the resulting volume has gone through 26 printings and sold almost 1 million copies in the U.S. alone. From Canada to Japan, Kliban products are now a multimillion-dollar business. Says Kliban: “I’m not silly about cats, but there is something funny and vulnerable and innocent about them.”

Since Kliban, it has been shown that cats are just as hilarious—and profitable—when they are dead. English-educated Simon Bond, 34, a bachelor who lives in Phoenix and London, was encouraged to publish 101 Uses for a Dead Cat by his friend Terry Jones, a Monty Python regular. Deceased felines in Bond’s black humor pose as toast racks, pencil sharpeners and potholders. Although the book has sold 765,000 copies in the U.S., the mood is too indigo for some ailurophiles. Says A.S.P.C.A.’S John Kullberg: “Coming upon the book is akin to being a member of the Moral Majority and seeing 101 Uses for a Dead Fetus. Bond, who has been a loving cat owner, although he is allergic to the animal, retorts, “Good comedy will always upset somebody. If I’d written 101 Uses for a Dead Aardvark, I bet no one would have complained.”

A retaliatory entry in the cat-book sweepstakes quickly appeared from bottom-line think tankers. A new entry which has a claw-hold on the bestseller lists is Cat’s Revenge: More than 101 Uses for Dead People. It is the product of Philip Lief, 36. A book packager and author who lives with his wife and cat in Southfield, Mass. He presents human corpses—and parts thereof—that serve gleeful felines as life rafts, bowling balls and stamp-licking machines. His next attempt to amuse in the cat-dollar sweepstakes will appear in March, Cat’s Revenge II, and in April, How to Make Love to a Cat.

Ex-Folk Singer Skip Morrow, 29, spoofs livelier kitties. The Second Official I Hate Cats Book employs a perplexed, Woody Allen-style feline as a polo ball, a terrified moose-hunting decoy and a freaked-out monastery candle snuffer. Morrow, who lives in southern Vermont with his two cats, Nina and Lucy, does not hate cats but rather what he feels people have made of them. Human avarice, not atrocity, is the root of the problem. Says Morrow: “There’s so much schmaltz from the pet industry. You see it on TV and in stores. My work is a comment on the state of merchandising, rather than whether cats should live or die. Next time, I’m going to make fun of people.”