Cartoonist Jim Davis was born and raised in Muncie, Indiana. In 1973, while working as an assistant for T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds, he created the comic strip Gnorm Gnat, which ran only in the Pendleton Times of Pendleton, Indiana, from 1973 to 1975 and met with little success. Davis had tried to syndicate the strip, but was unsuccessful; he noted that one editor told him that his "art was good, his gags were great, [but] nobody can identify with bugs."[5] Davis decided to peruse current comic strips to determine what species of animal characters might be more popular. He felt that dogs were doing well, but noticed no prominent cats. Davis figured he could create a cat star, having grown up on a farm with twenty-five cats. Thus was created the character of Garfield.[5]
Garfield, the star, was based on the cats Davis grew up around; he took his name and personality from Davis' grandfather, James A. Garfield Davis, whom he described as "a large, cantankerous man."[6] The name Jon Arbuckle came from a 1950s coffee commercial. Jon's roommate Lyman, added to give Jon someone to talk with, carried on the name of an earlier Gnorm Gnat character.[5] The final character was Lyman's dog Spot, who was renamed Odie so as to avoid confusion with a dog also named Spot in the comic strip Boner's Ark. From 1976 to early 1978, these characters appeared in a strip called Jon which also ran in the Times. The Jon comic strip was largely unknown until 2019, when YouTuber Quinton Hoover found several digital scans of the Jon publications from the Pendleton Community Library and Indiana State Library.[7] Jon first appeared in the Pendleton Times on January 8, 1976, just two weeks after Gnorm Gnat ended.
United Feature Syndicate accepted the strip for national distribution, which had been retitled Garfield on September 1, 1977, in March 1978 (ending its run in the Times on the 2nd) and made its nationwide debut in 41 newspapers on June 19 of that year (however, after a test run, the Chicago Sun-Times dropped it, only to reinstate it after readers' complaints).
