Jon (found prototype "Garfield" comic strip; 1976-1978)

From The Lost Media Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
GarfPrototype.png

Garfield as he appears in this comic strip.

Status: Found

Date found: 05 Jun 2020

Found by: Quinton Reviews

By now, almost everyone knows about Jim Davis's famous comic strip cat, Garfield. However, what is much lesser known is the fact that, before the Garfield comics were syndicated into several mainstream newspapers, Jim Davis had published various "prototype" Garfield comics weekly in the Pendleton, Indiana newspaper, The Pendleton Times. These comics were interestingly titled Jon.

About

Jon centers around the titular character Jon, along with his plain, stripe-less cat, Garfield. Lyman, the character who eventually infamously disappeared with no explanation in Garfield, also had an appearance here, along with his dog, Spot. Spot is the original version of Odie in this comic strip. It's unknown why his name was changed, but a likely reason is that the name "Spot" is a very stereotypical name for a dog, which was made fun of in one of the comics. This name change also resulted in Davis having to alter the punchline of one of the comics so that it would still work when remade in Garfield. Most comics in this series would eventually get slightly altered and re-released as mainstream Garfield comics when they came out. However, there were a few unique comics which never got adapted into Garfield.

Name Change

After September 1st, 1977, the strip's name was changed to Garfield, named after the cat in the comic strip. This was suggested by Tom K. Ryan, creator of the comic strip Tumbleweeds, pointing out that Garfield had all the good lines, and was the main focus of certain strips.

Mainstream Syndication

On March 2nd, 1978, it was revealed to Pendleton Times readers that the newly-named Garfield would be getting syndicated into more mainstream newspapers. 2 final prototype strips were shown as a farewell, showing designs for Garfield and Jon much closer to how they looked in the first few mainstream Garfield strips.

Resurfacing

For some reason, this short-lived comic strip had gone almost completely undocumented for 40 years until July 28th, 2019, when Youtuber Quinton Reviews had someone in Pendleton make scans of various then-lost Gnorm Gnat comic strips (Jim Davis's other Pendleton Times comic). However, to his surprise, he later got another email with the subject "Here is Jon", revealing to him, and the Garfield fandom, 38 of these comics.

Availability

From January 8th, 1976, to March 2nd, 1978, 112 Jon comic strips were produced. However, only 38 had been preserved on the internet from their initial discovery to their complete release via a Google Drive document uploaded by Quinton Reviews.[1] The first found strips were discovered in a public library in Pendleton, along with several of the Gnorm Gnat comic strips.

In January of 2020, Quinton travelled to Pendleton and scanned every Jon and Gnorm Gnat comic he could find,[2] before later making them all available for public consumption on June 5th, 2020 alongside an accompanying documentary video about the process.

Gallery

Images

Videos

A video mentioning Jon and including some comics. (Explanation starts at 10:29 comics start at 10:08)

Follow-up video from Quinton Reviews detailing the documentation process.

See Also

External Links

References