Garfield, the daily comic strip about a cat who does nothing and believes in nothing, has been going on for over 40 years. Now, the first three decades and change of strips, from the beginning of the orange cat’s lasagna fetishist ways in 1978 all the way to 2011, are going up for sale in a series of weekly auctions.
As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, the strips, on sale via Heritage Auctions in Dallas, TX, account for nearly all of the work done by creator Jim Davis before he began drawing the strip digitally in 2011 using a drawing tablet.
“There are just so many, and it was such a daunting task to figure what to do with them so that they could be out there where people enjoy them too,” Davis told the Hollywood Reporter. The comics, up until this point, have been sealed in a climate-controlled vault, and will now be sold at a rate of two daily strips a week.
According to Brian Wiedman, a comic grader at Heritage who THR talked to, the strips are going for fairly affordable prices, so far as collector’s items go—dailies for between $US500 ($725)-$US700 ($1,015), and the long Sunday strips from $US1,500 ($2,174)-$US3,000 ($4,349). That means that you, too, dear reader, could become an owner of the lengthy, meandering journeys of the most flippant animated cat to ever be played by Bill Murray.
If you are interested in owning a Garfield strip, may I suggest the horoscope method (which is what I just decided to call it), whereby you select the strip released on the date of your birth? Provided you were born after 1978, anyway. Just for fun, here’s mine, which bursts of romance:
Or you could do what everyone wants to do and buy the terrifying Halloween strips, which are sure to go for a lot of money. At the current pace, though, those iconic and creepy strips, released in 1989, won’t be on sale for a long while yet.