吉姆·戴维斯

詹姆斯·罗伯特·“吉姆”·戴维斯（英语：James Robert "Jim" Davis，1945年7月28日—），美国漫画家，因创作了加菲猫系列连载漫画而声名大振。

2018年，适逢加菲猫漫画面世四十周年，以香港为首站举行跨界展览，并表示只要加菲猫仍能带给人欢乐，自己会继续画下去。

早年生活

吉姆·戴维斯于1945年7月28日出生在印第安纳州菲尔蒙特的一个小农场家庭里。幼年与父亲詹姆斯·威廉·戴维斯、母亲安娜·凯瑟琳·卡特·戴维斯一起生活。在1978年6月19日首次刊登加菲猫系列漫画。

James Robert Davis (born July 28, 1945) is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strips Garfield and U.S. Acres. Published since 1978, Garfield is one of the world's most widely syndicated comic strips. Davis's other comics work includes T.K. Ryan's Tumbleweeds, Gnorm Gnat, and Mr. Potato Head.

Davis wrote or co-wrote all of the Garfield TV specials for CBS, originally broadcast between 1982 and 1991. He also worked on Garfield and Friends as an executive producer. Davis was the writer and executive producer for a series of CGI direct-to-video feature films about Garfield, as well as an executive producer for the The Garfield Show and Garfield Originals.

Early and personal life

James Robert Davis was born in Marion, Indiana, on July 28, 1945. He grew up on a small Black Angus cattle farm in Fairmount, Indiana, with his father James William Davis, mother Anna Catherine "Betty" Davis (née Carter), and his brother David. Davis's childhood on a farm parallels the life of Garfield's owner, Jon Arbuckle, who was also raised on a farm with his parents and a brother, Doc Boy, and is also a cartoonist whose birthday is on July 28. Davis attended Ball State University where he studied art and business; one of his fellow students was David Letterman. At Ball State he became a member of the Theta Xi fraternity.

At Fairmount High School in 1959, Davis joined the staff of his school's newspaper The Breeze, where he became the art editor. It was here that his first comic was featured, apparently inspired by school life. Davis also drew the majority of the illustrations for his 1963 senior yearbook, using the same characters.

Davis has been married twice. His first wife was Carolyn Lou Altekruse, whom he married in July 1969. The couple owned a dog named Molly. They have a son, Alexander. Davis's second and current wife is Jill Carol Hahn, who worked at his company, Paws, Inc., as a vice president; they were married on July 16, 2000. As a result, Davis became the stepfather of two additional children, Ashley and Christopher.

Davis joined the faculty of Ball State University in Muncie as an adjunct professor in fall 2006, lecturing on the creative and business aspects of the comics industry.

Davis resides in Albany, Indiana, where he and his staff produce Garfield under Paws, Inc., which he founded in 1981. Paws, Inc. employs nearly 50 artists and licensing administrators, who manage Garfield's worldwide licensing, syndication, and entertainment empire.

Davis is a former president of the Fairmount, Indiana chapter of the FFA.

In December 2019, Davis announced that he would hold weekly auctions for all hand-painted Garfield comics made from 1978 to 2011. He explained that he started drawing comics digitally using a graphics tablet in 2011. Older comics remained sealed in a climate-controlled safe, and Davis had to figure out what to do with them.

Career

Before creating Garfield, Davis worked for an advertising agency. In 1969, he began assisting Tom Ryan on Tumbleweeds. He then created his own comic strip, Gnorm Gnat, that ran weekly from 1973 to 1975 in The Pendleton Times. When Davis tried to sell it to a national comic strip syndicate, an editor told him: "Your art is good, your 'gags' are 'great', but bugs—nobody can relate to bugs!" He then began studying the comic strips; still believing that animals were funny, he noticed in Peanuts that Snoopy was not only a scene stealer but was a far greater marketing success than Charlie Brown. Believing that the comic market was oversaturated with dogs, he decided instead to create a cat as a main character for his next strip.