Funny business.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Paws Inc.'s Garfield character ventures - Cover Story

At 15, Garfield is as lazy as ever. "The lazier he gets, the busier I get," says Jim Davis, creator of America's--make that the world's--favorite cat.

In many ways, Jim Davis is the antithesis of Garfield, the comic cat that he created.

The real-life cartoonist from the Muncie area is a tireless worker; the fictional cat is lazy. Davis concerns himself with such worldly issues as the environment; Garfield is, as felines tend to be, aloof. Davis is fit; Garfield is fat. Each work week is so interesting that Davis looks forward to Mondays; Garfield, on the other hand, hates them. But the 47-year-old Davis loves lasagna, and so does Garfield, who celebrates his 15th birthday this month.

A lot has happened since June 19, 1978, when "Garfield" first hit the funny pages in 41 newspapers. What started as a small-time, home-based operation has blossomed into the multimillion-dollar Paws Inc., housed in several attractive buildings on a pastoral piece of property along a rural, two-lane road outside of Muncie. "Garfield" now appears in some 2,400 newspapers worldwide, the cat's Saturday-morning TV show is the most popular program in all of children's television, and more than 500 licensees are marketing more than 3,000 different Garfield-related products.

"Fifteen years ago, I was working in my family room," Davis recalls. "I had an assistant, and my wife, Carolyn, helped with phone calls and organization on the business side. We worked two or three years in our family room until we finally outgrew it when we had about five employees. So we found this nice piece of property that had a little two-bedroom ranch-style house, and we painted it and moved our studio in there, thinking it was all the space we would ever need. That was four or five expansions ago, and it was also about 42 employees ago--we've got 47 employees now."

The move to the off-the-beaten-path Paws location in 1981 represented more than just business growth. For Davis, it was almost a return to his roots. "I lived on a farm all my life until I went to college," he says, noting that the Grant County farm where he grew up is only about 25 miles from Paws. "That's one of the reasons we're out here. I always wanted to get back to the country, but this time on my terms. I don't have to do chores now. I was asthmatic as a child and had a lot of problems, but now I don't have to bale hay anymore."

As troublesome as his childhood asthma was, it was partly responsible for Davis' current success. Asthma on occasion forced him inside, and when it did he wiled away the hours drawing. Later, he went to Ball State University, where he claims he spent an inordinate amount of time drawing and playing jokes on people. If his grades suffered, his career certainly didn't.

After college he went to work for a Muncie advertising agency, Ad Graphics. "I was a paste-up boy for a year and a half," he recalls. Then in 1969, he became cartoon assistant for Tom Ryan, the creator of "Tumbleweeds."

"I was Tom's assistant for nine years. I did his backgrounds, borders and balloons, answered his fan mail, swept up around the office," Davis says. "That was a good time, and it gave me the discipline and told me what I needed to maintain a syndicated feature."

When not at work...