LASAGNA IS HIS FAVORITE DISH

Jim Davis, the creator of the pasta-loving feline Garfield, believes comic strips provide a much-needed break from reality.

He's fat. He's lazy. He's selfish. He's cynical.

He's generally endearing, because those kinds of things are forgivable in a cat.

According to cartoonist Jim Davis, that is why we identify with his creation, Garfield. Not only do we like him because he's a cat, but because we see ourselves in him.

"All I do is just create a mirror to life and show it back with a humorous twist," Davis admitted in a recent phone interview with Children's Express.

Growing up in Fairmount, Ind., Davis had about 25 cats on his family's farm and grew to love them.

"I was asthmatic as a child and I couldn't be outside much," Davis recalled. "To entertain myself, I drew a lot of pictures. My drawings were so bad that I had to label everything. I would draw a cow and have to write the word `cow' and point an arrow to it.

"For me it was a very natural thing to put words with pictures. It was a way of expressing myself.

"My dream was cartooning, but I couldn't imagine actually doing it," he continued. "I mean, I thought about being a doctor or a teacher or doing something else. It was just too wild that I could actually cartoon."

His first break

After college he worked for two years at an advertising agency. Then in 1969, he got his break. Davis went work on the Tumbleweeds comic strip as Tom Ryan's assistant. He did the backgrounds, borders and balloons.

While working for Ryan, he decided to try writing his own comic strip. He came up with the strip titled Gnorm the Gnat, which, Davis said, did not become syndicated because nobody could identify with bugs.

Davis continued to work for Ryan until 1976, when he started Garfield.

"I was looking for an idea for a good comic strip," says Davis. "I noticed that dogs were doing very well in the comics. (There were) Snoopy, Marmaduke, Fred Basset, but no cats at the time.

"I felt that if dog lovers loved dogs in the strips, surely cat lovers would like to see a cat. So I came up with the idea for Garfield, which is actually my grandfather's name.

"The name seemed to fit. Garfield sounds like a fat, lazy cat. Plus my grandfather was also a very large man and rather stubborn."

Readers identify with humor

Humor is one characteristic that Davis tries to include in each strip. When he writes his "gags" for Garfield, he tries to make them so they produce a kind of laugh that leaves people feeling a little better about themselves.

"If I can touch a person who's reading the paper and they say, `Oh gee, that reminds me of me,' they'll enjoy the strip more day in and day out because long after they've forgotten the gag, they'll remember the personalities of the characters," Davis said.

Through Garfield, Davis deals a lot with eating and sleeping because he says they are things that relate to everyone.

"We live in a time where we're made to feel guilty about overeating and oversleeping and not exercising," he pointed out. "Garfield defends his right to do those things. In that sense, he releases our guilt."

Davis doesn't write every day. "That would be tough because I'm not funny every day," he said. "I wait for funny times and then I write a lot of gags. I can write a week's worth of gags in a day."

And on those "funny" days, Davis makes sure he is alone, relaxed and rested at his headquarters in Albany, Ind. He tries to picture his subject, Garfield, in his mind.

Pouncing on an idea

When Garfield does something funny, Davis pauses to make a rough sketch of Garfield in action. He turns the sketch over to his assistants, who finish the drawing and inking.

Then he signs the finished product and sends it off to the syndicate, a company that sells and markets his strip to newspapers. Garfield appears in more than 2,400 newspapers internationally.

People inspire Davis. "I get a lot of fan mail saying people look forward to Garfield and that I make people laugh."

Since his creation 16 years ago, Garfield is now on TV, on T-shirts, on lunch boxes. Stuffed Garfield dolls are everywhere. So this past May, Davis' company, Paws Inc., repurchased the rights to Garfield.

He said he "wanted to bring the Garfield program back home, to get control of all of it so (the Davis' family) can build a little security. I feel like if we're in charge of the whole Garfield program, he's going to be around for a long, long, long time.

"If you lose control and you have Garfield do things that aren't true to his personality, or maybe aren't entertaining, or maybe are done just for the sake of making some money, that would turn people off to the character," he added.

What's next for Garfield?

In the future, Davis said, he'd like to do a Garfield movie and more children's books.

"I'd like to get Garfield into education more, to help teach people to read," he explained. "We're working more with literacy groups. I think Garfield should become involved a little more with the environment."

Davis believes that the comic strip is one of the last pure forms of entertainment these days. He feels that people go to the comics to get a break from the reality of the world.

"I don't do any social or political comments because I feel a responsibility to help balance the scales a little bit against some of the more depressing things going on," he said. "We should learn to laugh at ourselves and life isn't so bad after all."

EDITED BY: Mike Pothast, 14; Lisa Schubert, 14