![]() ![]() I let some people I knew influence the character and put them together. So I envisioned Garfield, which was my grandfather’s name, and he was a large, stubborn man with these human feelings. ![]() I thought, I’ll give the cat human thoughts and feelings but not be apologetic for it. It occurred to me that cats were being held back a little bit. As I was putting the strip together, I wanted to work with animals anyway because having worked on “Tumbleweeds,” it was a western strip with cowboys and Indians, Tom Ryan was always getting grief from Native American rights groups and women’s groups too because Hildegard Hamhocker was always chasing the main character Tumbleweeds in the strip. I thought, I’ll work with animals-they don’t pick on people. Snoopy, Marmaduke and so on.” So if dogs were doing well, I thought maybe people would want to see cats. I’d grown up on a farm with a lot of cats and so I was comfortable with the material. I submitted a lot of ideas to newspaper syndicates and finally an editor said, “Your scripts are great but bugs? Nobody can relate.” So I took a long hard look at the comics and I thought, “Dogs are doing really well. ![]() I had worked for nine years on the “Tumbleweeds” comic strip as Tom Ryan’s assistant, and during that time I tried a lot of ideas on my own to get my own strip started. ![]()
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