we get it - you don't like mondays

So you may have heard that the L.A. Times is dropping Garfield from its comics page (link). This may not interest you in the least, since you're probably not from L.A. and you probably don't read the comics page anymore and even when you did you were probably always a little puzzled as to why Garfield was still around. I mean, this strip is like the opposite of humour. Example:

But what you may not know is that Garfield was never meant to be funny, or memorable; rather, it is, and always has been, a money-making vehicle. According to this Slate article,

"[Creator Jim] Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman—his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising — and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was 'a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character,' Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. 'And primarily an animal. ... Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not.' So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat."

The article goes on to explain exactly how Davis managed to build up an empire that earns between $750 million and $1 billion a year without getting on anyone's bad side.

"Garfield's origins were so mercantile that it's fair to say he never sold out—he never had any integrity to put on the auction block to begin with. But today Davis spends even less time on the strip than he used to—between three days and a week each month. ... By comparison, Davis spends nearly every morning working on 'concepts for new products.' "

(link to full article)