Common themes in the strip include Garfield's laziness, obsessive eating, love of coffee and lasagna, disdain of Mondays, and dieting.

On August 6, 2019, New York City–based Viacom (now Paramount Global) announced that it would acquire Paws, Inc., including most rights to the Garfield franchise (the comics, merchandise and animated cartoons).

[3] Jim Davis continues to make comics, and a new Garfield animated series is in production for Paramount Global subsidiary Nickelodeon.

Davis had tried to syndicate the strip, but was unsuccessful; he noted that one editor told him that his "art was good, his gags were great, [but] nobody can identify with bugs.

[13][14] Originally created with the intentions to "come up with a good, marketable character",[15] Garfield has spawned merchandise earning $750 million to $1 billion annually.

[15] Now the world's most syndicated comic strip,[16] Garfield has spawned a "profusion"[12] of merchandise including clothing, toys, games, books, Caribbean cruises, credit cards, dolls,[17] DVDs of the movies or the TV series,[18] and related media.

These books helped increase the strip's popularity through sales, leading to several of them reaching the top of the New York Times best sellers list.

Jim Davis had also collaborated with Ball State University and Pearson Digital Learning to create ProfessorGarfield.org, an educational website with interactive games focusing on math and reading skills, and with Children's Technology Group to create MindWalker, a web browser that allows parents to limit the websites their children can view to a preset list.

The Arbuckle website creator writes: "'Garfield' changes from being a comic about a sassy, corpulent feline, and becomes a compelling picture of a lonely, pathetic, delusional man who talks to his pets.

[31][32] Still another approach to editing the strips involved removing Garfield and other main characters from the originals completely, leaving Jon talking to himself.

[50] On May 24, 2016, it was announced that Alcon Entertainment would develop a new CG-animated Garfield film, with John Cohen and Steven P. Wegner producing, and Mark Dindal directing the feature.

[51][52][53] In August 2019, Viacom acquired the rights to Garfield, leaving the status of the movie for the time uncertain, with Dindal confirming that the film was still in production in December 2020.

[4][54] On November 1, 2021, Chris Pratt was announced as the voice of Garfield, with animation being provided by DNEG, a production company of the film.

[58] Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal is a 1987 video game for the Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and the Amiga based on the comic strip.

[citation needed] Konami also released a Garfield handheld electronic game titled Lasagnator in 1991, which met with mild success.

[60] Joseph Papp, producer of A Chorus Line, discussed making a Garfield stage musical, but due to some complications, it never got off ground.

A full-length stage musical, titled "Garfield Live", was planned to kick off its US tour in September 2010, but got moved to January 18, 2011, where it premiered in Muncie, Indiana.

Customers order food through the official mobile app, which also contains games and allows users to purchase episodes of Garfield and Friends.

Though Garfield can be very cynical, he does have a soft side for his teddy bear, Pooky, food, and sleep, and during one Christmas he says, "They say I have to get up early, be nice to people, skip breakfast… I wish it would never end."

Jon (Full name: Jonathan Q. Arbuckle) is Garfield's owner, usually depicted as an awkward clumsy geek who has trouble finding a date.

Many gags focus on this; his inability to get a date is usually attributed to his lack of social skills, his poor taste in clothes (Garfield remarked in one strip after seeing his closet that "two hundred moths committed suicide";[78] in another, the "geek police" ordered Jon to "throw out his tie"),[79] and his eccentric interests which range from stamp collecting to measuring the growth of his toenails to watching movies with "polka ninjas".

[80] Jon was born on a farm that apparently contained few amenities; in one strip, his father, upon seeing indoor plumbing, remarks: "Woo-ha!

She has a somewhat deadpan, sardonic persona and almost always reacts negatively to Jon's outlandish and goofball behavior but can even find it endearing on occasion.

He also has odd relationships with household pests; Garfield generally spares mice, and even cooperates with them to cause mischief (much to Jon's chagrin), but will readily swat or pound spiders flat.

Most trips end up embarrassing because Garfield will pig out, or Jon will do something stupid, including wearing an ugly shirt, which happened one night when he took Liz on a date.

When Jon takes Liz on a date, Garfield occasionally tags along—once, he ate the bread and other food at an Italian restaurant they went to.

They sometimes are waited on by the Italian Armando, who is refined and sophisticated and shows a great loathing towards Jon, presumably for his immature and uncouth behavior at the prestigious eatery.

Two particular examples are Lillian, an eccentric (and very nearsighted) old lady with odd quirks, and Greta, a muscle-bound woman who was hired to look after the pets during New Year's Eve.

He is not descriptive, so animals including an elephant, monkeys, a seal, a snake, a kangaroo and joey, and turtles are brought to Jon's house for the reward.

Another story involved Jon going away on a business trip around Christmas time, leaving Garfield a week's worth of food, which he devoured instantly.