Never mind the fat shamers, Garfield was my kind of guy

Before I was old enough to cover my walls with Wham! posters and sing along with Madonna, I discovered Garfield. Aside from a simmering crush on a boy in long shorts and a school blazer who I studied from the other end of the mobile library, the overweight orange tabby was my first love.

He first appeared in 1976, when cartoonist Jim Davis launched a comic strip called Jon, about cartoonist Jon Arbuckle and his pet cat (the name of the strip changed to Garfield two years later). Garfield quickly became a global success, and later, the most widely syndicated comic strip in the world. Three TV series and six films, the most recent releasing in cinemas this month, attest to his enduring appeal.

When the first anthology was published in 1980, my parents gave me the book for Christmas. Living on the outskirts of the suburban bush belt, they were adamant that if we wanted a pet, we had to play with the transient lizards and echidnas in our front yard. I’d never lived with a cat, and Garfield was my entree into feline humour. There was something about the sarcasm, the lasagne obsession, and the orange and black stripes that I fell for.

Some of my friends loved Snoopy and Charlie Brown but for me, it was Garfield all the way. It always felt like he was speaking directly to me, and soon, I was saving up my weekly pocket money to collect anything I could get my hands on: plush toys for my bed, coffee mugs for my overly sweet tea, and plastic figurines that muscled Papa Smurf off my desk.

As a child of the ’80s, I watched as fad dieting become all the rage. Mum was an early adopter. There was the Scarsdale diet, the Cabbage Soup diet, the grapefruit diet, daily weigh-ins on the scales in her bathroom, and sometimes it seemed like the only food she ate was cottage cheese. Our television screens were filled with aerobics instructors in G-string leotards and diet products were exploding onto the market. I didn’t want to think about what I was eating, but popular culture was demanding that I do.

And then there was Garfield. At a time when everyone was being told to exercise more and eat less, he was scoffing hamburgers, pizza, donuts, cheese and, of course, his beloved lasagne. He was even dreaming about food. Davis said he wanted Garfield to have the sort of shame-free approach to life that we did not. But with book titles such as Garfield Takes the Cake, Garfield Tips the Scales and Garfield Sits Around the House, there was a sense that with each mouthful, he was being fat-shamed. Not that I recognised it at the time. I was just pleased to have found another lasagne lover.

Newspaper comic strips did not begin life as political commentary. They were originally called the “funnies”, created to encourage newspaper readership, although many adapted to offer sharp social satire. Davis has always been clear about his decision to make Garfield apolitical (which helps to explain why his image appeared in 1978 on almost-identical mugs for the Democrats and Republicans). But much has been written about him being the ultimate anti-worker, and a leisure-chasing “fat cat”. He behaves not as a cat, but as a work-shy human who hates Mondays, wants nothing more than to lie around and be waited on, and has no interest in the world outside his home.

While Charles M. Schulz subtly evolved his long-running syndicated comic strip Peanuts – introducing a Black American character and voicing feminist ideas through the character of Lucy – many of the changes to Garfield have been cosmetic.

Over the years he has slimmed down, his eyes have grown larger, his legs longer, and he now mostly walks around on two legs. Recently he has been repurposed as a tool for memes, spreading anti-Trump and pro-Black Lives Matter sentiment. None of this bothers Davis, who has also approved the webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield from creator Dan Walsh, who has removed the cat from Davis’ original strip, making Jon’s days far darker, as he ponders his lonely existence.

In his latest cinema iteration, voiced by Chris Pratt, Garfield meets his long-lost father, Vic, (Samuel L. Jackson) and is dragged into a heist with him and Odie the beagle. As far as I can remember, Garfield’s father is never mentioned in the books, so this is perhaps Hollywood’s attempt at inserting backstory or explaining the sarcasm and disinterest Garfield so often shows his family.

Instead of seeing the new film, I’ve decided to remember Garfield as he was. And me along with it: that 10-year-old kid giggling in her room as she dived into her Christmas present, wishing she too could have a cat like Garfield to share some lasagne with.

Garfield is in cinemas from May 30, with advance screenings on May 26.