For more than four decades, Garfield has made laziness, cynicism, and an all-consuming lasagna habit into something the world finds charming. But the grumpy orange tabby is only the most famous of the Garfield characters.
Behind the sarcasm sits a small, sharply drawn cast, from a long-suffering owner to a drooling dog. Every one of these Garfield characters earns their place.
This is the story of that gang. It is also how a cat built to sell newspapers became one of the most beloved animated cartoon characters in the world.
Before we meet the gang, a quick tip.
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Meet Garfield: The Cat Who Made Cynicism Relatable
Garfield first appeared on June 19, 1978. He arrived as a pure business plan. Cartoonist Jim Davis noticed the comics page was full of dogs and short on cats. So he built one to fill the gap. What he created was not a cute kitty. It was a sarcastic, lasagna-obsessed cynic, named after Davis’s own gruff grandfather, James Garfield Davis.
For his first few years, Garfield padded around on all fours like a normal cat.
Then Charles Schulz, the man behind Peanuts, suggested Davis stand him upright so he could pull off human gags.
The bipedal Garfield we know was born, and the sarcasm finally had a body to match.
- The cynic: Garfield runs on the power of negative thinking. He hates Mondays, loves naps, and says out loud what the rest of us only think.
- The foodie: his lasagna obsession is pure comedy. Davis picked the dish precisely because a fancy, layered Italian meal is a ridiculous thing for a lazy cat to crave.
- The everyman: under the fur, Garfield is all of us on a bad morning. That relatability is the engine of the whole strip.
Jon Arbuckle: The Long-Suffering Straight Man
Every great comedian needs a straight man. Among the Garfield characters, none plays that role better than Jon. Jon Arbuckle was named after a 1950s coffee advertisement. He is the well-meaning, deeply awkward owner.
Most of his days are spent as the butt of his own cat’s jokes.
Jon is more than a punching bag. He is a cartoonist, like his creator. In a fun piece of trivia, he shares Jim Davis’s July 28 birthday.
Garfield’s own birthday, by contrast, is June 19, the day the strip first ran. Where Garfield is all cynicism, Jon is all hope, endlessly chasing dates, dreams, and his pet’s approval.
- The foil: Jon’s sincerity is what makes Garfield’s sarcasm land. You cannot have a smart aleck without someone to aim it at.
- The heart: despite being mocked daily, Jon’s love for his grumpy cat never wavers. That warmth keeps the strip from turning mean.
- The lovable loser: Jon’s dating disasters and small humiliations are their own quiet comedy, relatable to anyone who has had an off decade.
Odie: The Sunshine to Garfield’s Storm Cloud
If Garfield is the cynic, Odie is his opposite in every way. He is the sunniest of the Garfield characters.
The dim, drooling, endlessly happy dog is pure joy on four legs. He has no idea Garfield spends half the strip shoving him off tables.
Odie has a stranger backstory than most fans realize. He debuted in 1978 as the pet of Lyman, Jon’s roommate, and was originally named Spot. When Lyman quietly vanished from the strip in 1983, Odie simply stayed. That disappearance has fed years of dark fan theories. Some were egged on by Davis’s own merchandise, which once joked, do not look in Jon’s basement.
- The contrast: Odie’s simple happiness is the perfect foil to Garfield’s gloom. One rolls his eyes, the other wags his tail.
- The target: he is Garfield’s favorite victim, and his good-natured cluelessness makes the teasing funny rather than cruel.
- The heart, part two: like Jon, Odie loves Garfield without conditions, which quietly softens the cat’s meaner edges.
The Rest of the Gang
Beyond the core trio, a small bench of memorable side characters rounds out the world. Each of these Garfield characters is built to bounce off the star. For a closer look at what they mean to Garfield, see our guide to Garfield’s relationships, ranked by social utility.
- Nermal: the impossibly cute kitten who exists mainly to annoy Garfield. The running gag is Garfield trying to mail him off to Abu Dhabi.
- Arlene: Garfield’s sharp-tongued sometime-girlfriend, the one cat who can out-snark him.
- Pooky: Garfield’s teddy bear and, tellingly, the one thing the cat shows real, unguarded affection for.
- Liz: the veterinarian and Jon’s long-running love interest, a rare voice of grounded common sense.
How a Grumpy Cat Built an Empire
Here is the part that would make Garfield proud. That lazy cat became one of the most lucrative characters in the history of comics.
Garfield holds the Guinness World Record as the most widely syndicated comic strip on Earth. At its peak it ran in more than 2,500 newspapers across 111 countries. In 1981, Davis founded Paws, Inc. to manage the empire, keeping full creative control while the merchandise multiplied. In 2019, he sold Paws to the company behind Nickelodeon, though he still works on the strip to this day.
- The record: at its height, Garfield appeared in thousands of papers worldwide, read by hundreds of millions of people daily.
- The merchandise: from suction-cup plush toys stuck to car windows to games, movies, and homewares, Garfield became a licensing juggernaut.
- The control: Davis’s smartest move was keeping the reins, so the cat’s voice stayed consistent across every single product.
Beyond the Comic Strip
Garfield’s reach stretches well past the funny pages, into television, film, and one truly strange corner of the internet.
For decades, the definitive voice of Garfield was Lorenzo Music. His flat, sleepy delivery on the animated series defined the character. After Music died in 2001, Bill Murray took over for the live-action films. There is a delicious irony there.
Music had once voiced Peter Venkman on the animated Real Ghostbusters, a role Murray originated on the big screen.
Years later, Murray returned the favor by inheriting Music’s most famous cat.
Then there is Garfield Minus Garfield. In 2008, artist Dan Walsh began deleting Garfield from his own strips, leaving Jon alone, talking to no one. The result was unexpectedly haunting, a portrait of one man’s quiet existential despair. Rather than object, Davis embraced it, admitting it revealed a surprising depth in Jon.
- The voices: from Lorenzo Music’s deadpan to Bill Murray’s films to newer big-screen takes, every actor brings a slightly different flavor to the same lazy cat.
- The experiment: Garfield Minus Garfield turned a gag strip into accidental art, and proved how much the strip’s whole mood depends on its star.
- The staying power: musicals, movies, and endless memes keep Garfield in the conversation decades after his debut.
More than forty years on, Garfield remains what he always was. He is a cat who would rather be sleeping, saying the quiet part out loud.
The Garfield characters around him, from patient Jon to joyful Odie, are the real secret. They turned a clever business idea into something people truly love.
He fits right in with the best orange cartoon characters and the most memorable 80s cartoon cats. Yet he stands a cut above nearly all of them.
Which of the Garfield characters is your favorite, and are you Team Lasagna or Team Nap? Let us know in the comments below.