http://www.slate.com/id/2102299
And from the opposite end of the spectrum, an examination of the hollow sham/commercial juggernaut that is Garfield.
Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman – his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising – and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was “a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character,” Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. “And primarily an animal. Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not.” So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn’t a strip for the nation’s 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.