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Garfield hits 30

Garfield adores ketchup Garfield, the comic strip featuring the lazy orange cat with an ever-despairing owner, Jon, hits 30 today.

June 19, 1978, is considered to be the birthday of Garfield (the cat) as well as Garfield (the comic strip), with strips noting his tenth birthday in 1988 and his 25th in 2003.

The sleepy-eyed cat is the creation of cartoonist Jim Davis, whose own birthday (July 28) falls on the same day as that of Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's long-suffering owner. He and Garfield now appear in at least 2,570 newspapers and are read by about 263 million people every day- 4 per cent of the world's population.

Jim Davis created Garfield in 1978

With time, he has taken on more human qualities, including walking on two feet. He stands proud as being the world's most widely circulated comic character, running in 2,400 newspapers, he has obviously retained his appeal around the world.

The idea, Davis once told The Washington Post, was “a conscious effort to come up with a marketable character”. He fools you by being sardonic and ginger, but Garfield's real strength is his inoffensiveness. In the 1980s, when Garfield car toys were becoming just a little too popular, Davis stopped making them for five years. The business model, he says, is Snoopy. "If nobody hates you, you never die."