Okay, shut the fuck up everybody. Here is some really important Yea Forumsntent:

was this the actual beginning of garfield's love of lasagna?

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Prototype Garfield doing actual cat poses is kind of adorable

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so surreal

The original was funnier.

Shit, thanks OP!

I wonder how the design would have changed if he kept this one instead of radically changing it

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Jon in that last panel looking expressive as hell

funny is a strong word...

>where could my candy cane be

I love lost media

I tried drawing it and it isn't pretty

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Yea, I lose a lot of media pretty often.

oh god what's with the penistail

I was trying to be true to the design

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I find it interesting that even back then Davis had fully developed the strip's "font".

Interpretation of the original artwork, you can see the "penis-tail" in I believe it's supposed to be hair, kind of like how Calvin's hair has a bunch of weird stray lines.

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bump

Has Jim responded to these findings?

>Gnorm didn’t end with him being stepped on
I distinctly remember seeing that strip though. It was reprinted in one of the fancier collections along with some more Gnorm Gnat strips. I want to say it was >pic related but i remember it having a holographic cover. Does anyone remember this?

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I have an old, beat-up version of this book lying around myself.

can you get a scan of the strip? I can't find any copy of it online

It's entirely likely that it was a redraw, or a never-published final strip he did after it was over or that he wanted to be the final one, but the publisher decided against, or something.

No promises, it's deep within storage somewhere and I apologize for it though I'll at least make a token effort to look - although I DO distinctly remember Davis mentioning Gnorm being stepped on in his recollections within the book, though I also don't remember actually seeing the strip. I also have to point out my version never had the holographic cover, which indicates maybe differences between the versions we had.

Thinking on what the user above said on Davis keeping mum, Davis has always been genuinely funny but also a damnably clever businessman. He likely has no shame against Beta-Field but also is smart enough to understand a different Garfield being seen or known by younger fans would make things feel off-kilter, because he kept a real fucking tight eye on merchandise. Mark Evanier once told a story on his site of a meeting with Davis during Garfield And Friends where Davis gave a serious look-and-play-over with a proposed piece of merch, insisting it be as quality as it can be. I can understand it because as a kid I always loved my Garfield toys and impressed at how consistent they were. I have no way to prove this, either, but as a show of that: once there was a McDonalds' toy featuring Garfield on a red scooter with Odie in a sidecar... and that same bike with the duo in/on it appeared in a coloring book to my shock and delight.

Really, Davis was always interesting to me because he was utterly shameless and honest on making money through Garfield but he always seemed to be a genuinely pleasant and funny guy besides that. Garfield's humor is so basic it rolls right back to being genuinely funny, in addition to him being seemingly insistent on genuinely quality products, product whore or not.

Oh god it's Quinton.

>Quinton
Fuck off

Yeah yeah, it's him. But he brought some good food on our barren table so you're gonna shut up and eat and you're going to like it.

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UH OH IT'S THE PERSON THAT SAID THING I DIDN'T LIKE ONCE, SO IT AUTOMATICALLY INVALIDATES EVERYTHING THEY EVER ACCOMPLISH IN THEIR ENTIRE LIFE

you have a problem?

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First time I've heard of this guy. Redpill me so I know why I should hate him.

>quinton reviews

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he once made a video where he said that he hates trump a lot

>30 responses and several hours of up-time and not one person complains about quinton
>suddenly, three void of substance complaints within 20 minutes
gee, I wonder if this is samefagging

He's kind of been a drama lama lately. One big thing is he's starting to do the things he criticized Linkara for doing when he started. Not to mention the weird Mumkey jones shit he decided to comment on.

Speaking of classic Garfield, has there been any word on volume 3?

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I appreciate that I could apparently draw better than Jim Davis early in his career.

>Not to mention the weird Mumkey jones shit he decided to comment on.
wha?

What should we call this form of Garfield?

Garfield.

Garfield blanco

>CAPITALISM BAD
>builds online presence memeing consumerist shit like Garfield, and Bee Movie

Who gives a shit about some crummy newspaper strip. Wake me went you want to discuss a comic that matters. Like Ralph Snart Adventures!

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>goldeneye 64 box art.png

It must be his obsession with managing the Garfield brand image

The book in your pic mentions Gnorm being stepped on in his final comic, but it doesn't actually show a comic of that happening.

Because he printed some Gnorm strips in that book but didn't include the final one despite describing it, I always thought he was just joking.

A guy who made a bland comic made a really ugly, also-bland comic before that? Damn, that's a really cool surprise.

You're thinking of this one.

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Scrotum face and penis tail.

I would like to request this reversed, penis face and scrotum tail.

fucking underrated

Also amazing that none of the "journalists" that covered the history of Garfield ever thought of digging up the Gnat and Jon comics.

Makes you wonder how absolutely fucking lazy reporters are.

I kinda want to see garfield in pic related pose

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Fake

Why investiage or look into things when you can just rewrite the company press release?

not content with stealing his pipe, garf goes for his cane instead.

god fuck I'm getting nermal vibes from this and I don't like it.

Imagine if this Garfield had been turned into a show with his original voice.

youtube.com/watch?v=FfQLJmKWeR8

Pretty cool to get a missing link in Garfield's whisker evolution. I was never entirely sure if those things on top of his head really were whiskers, or if they were supposed to be ear tufts like on maine coons (which would make sense considering their location), or if it was just some scruffy-looking fur (which it kinda looks like in the very first strips).
The whisker placement feels like it makes sense in the prototype Garfield's design, but the syndicated version makes it seem somehow odd.

Also, apparently Garfield used to have eyelashes. Jim Davis' drawing habits are weird when it comes to this stuff. Usually cartoon eyelashes are drawn only when you want to indicate femininity, but Davis drew them on characters like Nermal and Orson as a sign of their youth (and confused lots of readers into assuming that these characters were girls). And apparently Garfield had eyelashes too because...? Not sure why.

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I've read the book but can't remember what he said or how he said it. But if he was just joking, that would make sense; I've seen him make some odd jokes in Garfield books before.

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>Also amazing that none of the "journalists" that covered the history of Garfield ever thought of digging up the Gnat and Jon comics.
To be honest, I'm pretty sure that none of those journalists could give a single collective fuck about garfield.
Even assuming a competent journalist: Garfield is not an important political or social issue, so there is no worry that if you screw up, you're gonna get in trouble. Garfield is something that most people only very casually care about, if at all, so nobody is gonna be thrilled about your big scoop. And individually, I don't think those journalists would care about garfield - it was probably an assigned job, not something they chose to work on.
In effect, think of it like very boring homework on a subject you don't care about. Would you really go digging for actual real sources, or would you just copy wikipedia to be done with it as soon as possible?

>Face is a ballsack
>Tail is a droopy penis
I want Jim Davis to talk to me about his father

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this pic definitely proves that we shouldn't take everything jim says about the history of garfield too seriously.

The fact that years worth number of comic strips were lost and no one knew about them is so fucking bizarre.

Shows where we are as a culture now.
Information getting irreversibly lost and forgotten was the default for hundreds of years. Only the greatest creations would be preserved. Now, it's shocking to discover that a comic strip from a small town newspaper wasn't available worldwide

So... he... is... sane? What?

This is Library of Alexandria stuff.

I really like decrepit ballsack garfield's design, it seems better suited to his personality

I dont think we're supposed to take it seriously

The comic strip from a small town newspaper evolved into a worldwide franchise that everyone recognises by sight, though. It's been more than 40 years since Garfield began its run, and I'm surprised nobody ever said during all these years "hey, this is driving me crazy, but does anyone else remember those early strips where Garfield used to look totally different?". It might get people curious enough to look into it or it might get dismissed as a hoax/creepypasta; either way, I'm surprised there were never even any vague rumors about this and the discovery happened completely out of the blue.

On the other hand I can also see this user's point: Garfield's a pretty safe and bland newspaper comic that people read casually every once in a while, and it's not common for anyone to feel so passionately about the comic that they'd try to dig into its early history. Although in recent years, it has looked like Garfield is gaining some kind of momentum with a supposedly ironic fandom that goes to ridiculous lengths with the franchise (the pipe strip, Garfield horror art, and so on).

This whole thing makes me wonder if there are any other cool unexpected Yea Forums-related treasures like this hidden somewhere that will be discovered during our lifetimes. Personally, I keep hoping someone still has copies of those Sam & Max comics that were published in some college newspaper and never got reprinted later. Pic related; this was described on Telltale's site as "The first published Sam & Max strip, drawn the night before deadline, 1980".

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Beta Garfield reminds me of Double King.
youtube.com/watch?v=w_MSFkZHNi4

a lot of that stuff here
galesaur.com/portfolio/jon-2/

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>I keep hoping someone still has copies of those Sam & Max comics that were published in some college newspaper and never got reprinted later
Steve Purcell kept them

>and I'm surprised nobody ever said during all these years "hey, this is driving me crazy, but does anyone else remember those early strips where Garfield used to look totally different?"
I mean, possibly they did. Like you said - those would likely be dismissed as hoaxes, since people claiming this probably didn't have the newspapers archived, and wouldn't bother going to a historian.
Reminder that a beta version of Pokemon Gold surfaced about a year or so ago, containing dozens of prototype pokemon designs, there was a medium-sized buzz about it for about a week, then everybody forgot. And it's arguably a bigger franchise than garfield.

What gets me is that this isn't LOST media, this is forgotten media, Quinton was not looking for this, it came about in the research. There were never any serious internet rumor of this either.

The closest I can get to this mentally is someone who found the beta version of the Lithuanian SSR's anthem (by gluing together an old broken record tape) , and even that was implied to exist from the date of the country vs the creation of the anthem.

it's actually really interesting that he set out to search for believed-lost media (gnorm) and found some truly forgotten stuff (jon)

Makes you wonder how many similar pop culture artifacts like that may have existed that nobody remembers anymore. An early test run of spiderman that the authors disowned? A short lived batman animated series that only aired three episodes once? A Transformers official novel that only a few people bought?

Holy fuck, this is way too adorable.
and JUST might be my new headcanon

You forgot to mention that he started looking into the lost comics because he was making a Jon Arbuckle short film
youtu.be/GpbpTVu-KaU

he mentions it briefly in the video

There probably are. Remember that Mexican Spider-Man comic people talked about? There was also a Mexican Spider-Man comic strip, but no one knows if it was new material or a reuse of the comic book stuff.

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Looks like it. The syndicated version seems to have changed it into a steak in this particular strip, but the love of lasagna still stayed.
Also, I just learned that OP created this thread on National Lasagna Day.

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We're not talking about President Garfield, we're talking about Garfield the cat.

>literally the same joke for 40 years since day one

According to the 1970 census, Pendleton had a population of only 2,243. We can assume that not everyone read the town paper, and of those that did not all of them read Davis's comics. I'm guessing the number would have been around less than a thousand, which is extremely small. For comparison, something like Clockman would have been seen by at least a few hundred thousand people, if not over a million.

With AI getting more advanced we can create President Garfield The Cat

Bloom County did it.

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Glad someone else made a topic. I made one before the video and no one cared then I didn't see one when the video premered and got worried

I think that comic was made but never printed

So because you're a dick who can't enjoy things?

Was this an elaborate troll on Jim's part? I can imagine that after a few years of success, it dawned on him that no one in Pendleton, Indiana remembered that the prototype Garfield even happened, so he just kinda rolled with it and see how long it would take for anyone to notice.

Either that or he (or the paper) lost the original drawings of "Jon" long ago and he wasn't willing to reprint a grainy shit copy in later compilations.

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I love stuff like this, I never really interacted with the community but it's why I occasionally look through the lost media wiki. Sucks they adopted the waifutan shit though.

A lot of work went into this one joke.

Weird that it was seemingly never mentioned not once though. I mean there's always a chance it came up in some decades old Garfield material like interviews or magazines but it was never really known.

bump

I know a lot of people here are surprised that years and years of strips had been lost and are surprised that no one dug them out but you have to remember the source. Prior to getting picked up by the syndicate and getting published nationally these comics were being released in a local independent newspaper. The only way you'd be able to see them would be to go to that one specific town and hope they had archival copies of old issues of that newspaper. This is decades before the internet too which means unless you were from that town and read that newspaper there's a very good chance you'd never have heard of it. Especially if Jim Davis didn't see fit to talk about it.

Given that Davis redrew the entire run of Jon when he started Garfield he probably didn't think it was worth mentioning and he may even have forgotten about it decades later.

he might have just thought them not worth remembering
but came to my mind as well. I've heard he was always very conscious of Garfield as a brand.

It's probably to make Garfield as marketable as possible like others have pointed out.

I find it interesting how absolutely nobody who read the strip on the original newspaper has mentioned it or had "Mandela effect" memories of it.

Is Garfield /m/?

>I've heard he was always very conscious of Garfield as a brand.
Garfield was specifically invented to sell and be popular. It was never a project of passion, it was business investment.

because the "Mandela effect" is limited to schizotypal millennials and zoomers.

He made some other joke about 10 premises he had for comics before Garfield. The last one was "Garfield the Toaster", so he's definitely having a laugh.

What's even going on in that first panel? Is that his tongue or something?

I assumed the ink just accidentally got smeared.

I know, it's just weird how there's apparently NOBODY who remembers the old Jon comics, mistaking them for old Garfield ones.

I know it wasn't in a syndicated paper but fuck, there had to be someone out there who remembered.

His fallen titans series is nice.
He really is thirsty for that tranny dick tho

i thought it might have been part of the tree but it wasnt in the next panel

>Oh, Lawsey, Lawsey, Lawsey
What did he mean by this?

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Based

>Also, it seems like either he, or some patron of his, was actually here two days ago, because I found a thread with 0 responses that linked to some PDFs of the comics.

Link to thread please.

Did they ever release Berke Breathed's "Academia Waltz" comic? I remember the only way to read it was in a very rare out of print book, and even then the book didn't contain every strip made. The old Bloom County collections were also incomplete but they released that complete Bloom County collection a few years ago.

>they released a nearly complete collection four years ago
Well I'll be damned!
idwpublishing.com/berkeley-breatheds-academia-waltz-dances-its-way-to-idw-publishing/

He sold enough collections of Academia Waltz to pay his college tuition in full. I'll bet some UT alums have a copy squirreled away.

Wow, I didn't know that. Tuition was certainly a lot cheaper back then, but it's still impressive for a cartoonist self-publishing books.

Jim Davis constantly recycles jokes within the Garfield strip itself, sometimes word for word, sometimes practically panel by panel.

Local slang from the area where Davis grew up. It's like saying "Lordy".

U.S. Acres was Jim Davis's greatest creation

This is actually really cute

It was almost half a century ago, had a very small run, and quite a few of them got recycled into Garfield strips.

Far as it not appearing in reprints or other books, the publisher probably didn't see much value in the earlier design and Jim would rather spend his time on weird side-projects than rehashing an earlier era of something that was never a passion project for him.

Our second orange president

I thought it was boomers creating elaborate theories to explain their rapidly diminishing mental facilities

yes

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Probably the most interesting thread topic on this board in awhile.

Good points.

It occurred to me that maybe someone saw prototype Garfield comics on the paper but when the syndicated version later came up, they might not have even realized it was the same comic. I've read the 1970s Garfield strips multiple times and I could instantly notice that the prototype Garfield strips looked very familiar, but modern Garfield's appearance is a lot more iconic among the public, and he looks entirely different than the early version. The prototype version didn't even have stripes. People who only know the character's current look would not have much reason to think that these two are the same cat.

Also, most people aren't comic geeks and wouldn't have paid that much attention to it. And it was printed in a newspaper rather than a book; newspapers usually end up in the trash very quickly. Even if someone had remembered prototype Garfield and was mildly curious about it, it took a while until the internet emerged and searching/sharing information became easier than it used to be.

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boards.fireden.net/co/thread/108971775/#108971775

I recently found out that the U.S. Acres series has a few book compilations of their own thanks to a friend who got one as a birthday present.

>crummy
Go drown in a pail of water

actual good thread and good job user

>big! meaty! paws!

Oh yeah, there were 5 books in the U.S. and even more books in the U.K., under the name Orson's Farm. I was excited to find one of the book collections at the flea market.

>there were only like, two or three gnorm comics floating around the internet, and I'm not sure if those were not later re-creations.
I remember one Garfield anniversary books ("In Dog Years I'd Be Dead" I think) had a few of the Gnorm Gnat comics reprinted.

They're all on the Garfield website these days as well

I had heard about the original concept for the strip being "Jon" somewhat recently but I assumed that was just a proposal, not that it was drawn and published

What I really want to see that I never found as a kid is the Judgement Day book

>Unironic, wholesome Garfield fancomic
This is refreshing

What a fucking faggot OP lmao

he tried his best

Oh, I didn't know there was a sequel! I knew about the original one but hadn't seen this. That's a sweet comic.

this is some roxygen shit.

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That's how you make a successful comic strip.

Quinton is a hack and fraud and not even a true Garfield fan. Literally everything about these prototype strips, except for the fact that they were published in The Pendleton Times after Gnorm Gnat ended, was already known information. Jim Davis has talked about them in interviews, and the were featured prominently in the 20th and 25th anniversary books.

I could only find scans of the 25th anniversary book, but if anyone here has the 20th, feel free to upload it.

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While there's mention of a "prototype" there's no mention of the Jon strip being published.

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These are presented as sketchbook sketches and not a published comic strip

That's what I said.
>Literally everything about these prototype strips, except for the fact that they were published in The Pendleton Times after Gnorm Gnat ended, was already known information.

Quinton is acting like this is some long lost discovery he's made, when in reality these strips were being republished in Garfield books as far back as 1998.

Embarrasing.

But it says in >Jim worked on the feature for nearly eighteen months before it was finally accepted for syndication.

And shows finished comic strips.

>not even a true Garfield fan
What does a person have to do in order to qualify as a true Garfield fan? I don't know who Quinton even is and I don't really care if there's some e-celeb drama involving him, but he made me aware of some Garfield trivia that I didn't previously know about.

Thanks for sharing those pages, it's cool to know that Davis has discussed this stuff before after all. I didn't know about the existence of the 25th anniversary book and I'm pretty sure it never even got released in my country. The 20th anniversary book did get a release, but it's been a while since I read it and I don't have memories of it.
This thread has made me want to look up these books. Did the 30th or 40th anniversary books have any interesting articles or art in them, too?

The rest of the anniversary collections are just strip reprints. The 30th has some sketches but that's it.

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I always assumed that Liz was created as a disposable character who was only needed for one specific week of vet gags, but then she ended up becoming useful enough to stick around. Her first appearance in the comic happened a little more than a year after the comic had began its run.
Those sketches of her look very similar in style compared to early Jon, though. So she must've been created at around the same time as the rest of the main cast, and her appearance was planned from the start even if she took her time to finally pop up.

Are there other examples like this one?

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tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/Garfield

The Recycled Script entry.

We know from the proto strips shown in the video that the Vet originally wasn't Liz, it was gonna be this kooky guy. Liz was probably created as a love interest for Jon and then when Garfield got syndicated, Davis probably repurposed her as the Vet instead.

Wtf I hate Quinton now

Huh, neat.