19th June: Garfield

Garfield the cartoon Cat first appeared on this date in 1978. 10 things you might not know about Garfield:

1. Garfield was named after, and based on, creator Jim Davis's grandfather, James A. Garfield Davis. Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle was named after a 1950s coffee commercial.
2. Garfield loves Italian food because he was born in the kitchen of Mama Leoni's Italian Restaurant.
3. Owner Jon's birthday is 27th July. His full name is Jonathan Q. Arbuckle. It was stated in 1980 that Jon was then thirty years old, meaning that he should be in his sixties now. His job is mentioned just once, in the very first Garfield comic strip - he is a cartoonist. After struggling to get a girlfriend for many years, he's now going out with Dr. Liz Wilson, Garfield's vet.
4. Before Garfield, Jim Davis created a comic strip called Gnorm Gnat, which, although the art was good and the jokes funny, wasn't very successful because, as one editor put it, "nobody can identify with bugs." Davis studied cartoon strips to see which characters were successful. Dogs were very popular, but there were few, if any, cartoons featuring cats. Davis grew up on a farm with 25 cats, and decided that it should be easy for him to come up with an idea based on a cat.
5. Originally, Jon Arbuckle was meant to be the main character, until the newspapers and syndicates told Davis they would prefer the strip to focus on the cat, because the cat got all the best lines. Even so, after a test run, the Chicago Sun-Times dropped Garfield, only to be inundated by so many complaints from readers that they had to bring it back.
6. Jon originally had a friend called Lyman, whose sole purpose was to give Jon someone to talk to. He was written out when it became clear that Jon and Garfield were able to communicate nonverbally, and Jon adopted Lyman's dog, Odie.
7. Garfield is set in Muncie, Indiana, which just happens to be the home of Jim Davis.
8. Garfield holds the Guinness World Record for being the world’s most widely syndicated comic strip. It is syndicated in more than 2500 newspapers and journals. Garfield also has nearly 17 million fans on Facebook.
9. There are only three countries in the world which have given Garfield a different name. They are Norway, Finland and Sweden, where he is known as Gustav.
10. The once ubiquitous Garfield plush toys attached to car windows with suction pads came about because of a mistake. They were intended to have velcro on the paws, so people could stick them on curtains. However, the designers sent back a sample with suction pads instead, having misunderstood the specification. Davis stuck it on a window, and said that if it was still there in two days he would approve the design anyway. It was, and the rest is history.