Jim Davis Net Worth

What is Jim Davis' Net Worth?

Jim Davis is an American cartoonist who has a net worth of $800 million.

Jim Davis turned a simple comic strip into one of the most lucrative licensing empires in entertainment history. He is best known as the creator of "Garfield," the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating orange cat who debuted in newspapers in 1978 and quickly became a global pop culture fixture. While Davis's artistic style was intentionally straightforward, his business instincts proved exceptional, allowing him to transform a daily comic into a multimedia brand with extraordinary staying power.

Davis began his career working in advertising and cartooning before creating "Garfield" with a clear commercial strategy in mind. He studied existing strips and noticed a surprising gap: there were very few comics centered on cats, despite their popularity as pets. Designed to be broadly relatable and easily translatable across cultures, "Garfield" emphasized universal humor rather than topical jokes, a choice that made the strip evergreen and highly syndication-friendly. Within a few years, "Garfield" was running in thousands of newspapers worldwide.

The true scale of Davis's success came through licensing. Garfield appeared on everything from greeting cards and calendars to clothing, toys, and household products. At its peak, the brand generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually in retail sales, making it one of the most commercially successful cartoon franchises ever created. Davis largely stepped away from day-to-day drawing duties early on, overseeing a team of artists and writers while retaining creative control and ownership.

Beyond print, "Garfield" expanded into animated television specials, multiple TV series, and feature films, including the live-action/CGI hybrids "Garfield: The Movie" and "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties." In 2019, Davis sold Paws, Inc., the company that managed Garfield, to Viacom, further cementing the character's long-term legacy.

Jim Davis's career stands as a rare example of a cartoonist who combined mass appeal with disciplined brand management, creating a character whose cultural and financial impact rivals that of far more complex creations.

Early Life

Jim Davis was born James Robert Davis on July 28, 1945, in Marion, Indiana. He grew up with his mother Anna, father James, and brother Dave on a cow farm in Fairmount, Indiana. Davis attended Fairmount High School, where he was Art Editor of the school newspaper, "The Breeze." Jim's first comic was featured in "The Breeze," and he drew numerous illustrations for the yearbook during his senior year. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Ball State University to study art and business, and he joined the Theta Xi fraternity.

(Photo by Kevin Winter/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)

Early Career

Davis worked at an advertising agency before he created "Garfield," and from 1969 to 1978, he was the assistant of Tom Ryan, creator of the "Tumbleweeds" comic strip. While working for Ryan, Jim created the comic strip "Gnorm Gnat," and it ran in "The Pendleton Times" from 1973 to 1975. When he tried to sell "Gnorm Gnat" to a national comic strip syndicate and was told "nobody can relate to bugs," he took inspiration from the popularity of Snoopy in the "Peanuts" comic strips and decided to create his own furry scene-stealer.

Garfield

Jim Davis's career-defining creation began modestly. From 1976 to 1978, he published a comic strip titled "Jon" in The Pendleton Times, centering on a mild-mannered cartoonist and his sardonic cat. When the strip was retooled and renamed "Garfield," the focus shifted decisively toward the cat, a creative choice that would prove transformative. In June 1978, the newly branded strip entered national syndication, debuting in just 41 newspapers.

Growth was rapid and relentless. "Garfield" resonated with editors and readers alike thanks to its broad, accessible humor and timeless themes: food, laziness, Monday dread, and mild contempt for human ambition. Davis deliberately avoided topical jokes, political references, or niche cultural humor, ensuring the strip translated easily across regions and generations. Within a few years, "Garfield" became one of the most widely read comics in the world. By 2013, it was syndicated in more than 2,500 newspapers globally, earning a Guinness World Record as the most widely syndicated comic strip in history.

Davis expanded the Garfield universe throughout the 1980s and beyond. He created "U.S. Acres" (also known as "Orson's Farm"), which often appeared alongside "Garfield" in newspapers and later as part of animated adaptations. From 2000 to 2003, he also wrote a "Mr. Potato Head" comic strip in collaboration with Brett Koth, further demonstrating his interest in character-driven, licensing-friendly properties.

Garfield's success extended far beyond print. The character starred in numerous animated television specials, including "Here Comes Garfield," "Garfield Goes Hollywood," and "Garfield Gets a Life," all of which became ratings hits. The long-running animated series "Garfield and Friends" aired on CBS from 1988 to 1994, followed years later by "The Garfield Show," which ran on Cartoon Network and later Boomerang.

The franchise reached theaters with two live-action/computer-animated feature films, "Garfield: The Movie" and "Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties," both voiced by Bill Murray. Combined, the films grossed more than $340 million worldwide. Additional direct-to-video releases further extended the brand's reach to younger audiences.

Buying Back His Rights

Historically, comic artists had to sell the rights to their creations upon signing a deal with a syndicator. For example, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz never owned his IP outright during his lifetime. They had to buy a minority share years after his death.

The same was true for Jim Davis and Garfield, but Jim took a different path. Davis famously bought back the rights to Garfield from his original syndicate in 1994 for an estimated $15–$20 million, a move that allowed him to keep nearly 100% of future profits. That's the same as paying $30-45 million today after adjusting for inflation. He reorganized the business under his company, Paws, Inc.

This would eventually prove to be a very wise investment! By the early 2000s, Garfield merchandise was generating between $750 million and $1 billion in annual retail sales.

Sale to Viacom/Paramount

In 2019, Jim Davis made a major move to simplify his life and return to his "cartoonist roots" by selling Paws, Inc., the global intellectual property holder for Garfield and U.S. Acres, to Viacom (now Paramount Global).

While the specific financial terms of the deal were never publicly disclosed, it was a massive consolidation of power for Nickelodeon, which integrated the orange cat into its portfolio alongside the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Viacom acquired 100% of Paws, Inc., including all rights to content, merchandising, and location-based experiences. This essentially gave Nickelodeon the keys to the entire "Garfield universe."

The deal did not include the rights to the live-action Garfield movies (owned by Disney/20th Century Studios) or the 2024 animated film (distributed by Sony/Columbia).

Davis famously did not retire. As part of the deal, he formed a new company, Funny, LLC, and continues to write and draw the daily Garfield comic strip. He also served as an executive producer for the Nickelodeon animated projects that followed.

Shortly before and after the sale, Davis divested himself of other major Garfield assets. He donated the 19-acre Paws, Inc. headquarters in Indiana to the Ball State University Foundation (which then auctioned it for millions) and began auctioning off his personal archive of over 11,000 hand-drawn comic strips, estimated to be worth upwards of $5 million.

(Photo by Vince Bucci/Getty Images)

Personal Life

Jim married Carolyn Altekruse on July 26, 1969, and they welcomed a son, James, before divorcing. Davis has been married to his second wife, Jill, since July 16, 2000, and he is stepfather to her two children from a previous marriage.

In 2016, Jim was hired as an adjunct professor at Ball State University to teach the workshops "Drawing as a Cartoonist" and "The Sequential Narrative" and present the lectures "The History and Development of Garfield" and "The Business of Garfield."

He lives in Albany, Indiana, and he produces "Garfield" under his company, Paws, Inc., which he launched in 1981. Nearly 50 licensing administrators and artists are employed by the company.

In late 2019, Davis decided to begin holding weekly auctions for hand-painted "Garfield" comics that he created between 1978 and 2011 (in 2011, he started digitally drawing comics with a graphics tablet). The comics had been kept in a climate-controlled safe, and Jim stated, "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 is the founder of the Professor Garfield Foundation, which supports children's literacy.

Awards and Nominations

Davis has been nominated for 10 Primetime Emmys, winning Outstanding Animated Program for "Garfield in the Rough" (1985) and "Garfield in Disguise" (1986) and Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming Less Than One Hour) for "Garfield's Babes and Bullets" (1989). He received a Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement in 1983 and a Sagamore of the Wabash from the State of Indiana in 1988. Jim has been honored with several awards from the National Cartoonist Society: the Elzie Segar Award for Contributions to Cartooning (1985), Best Strip (1986), and the Reuben Award for Overall Excellence in Cartooning (1989). He was presented with an Indiana Arbor Day Spokesman Award by the Indiana Division of Natural Resources and Forestry in 1989 and a Good Steward Award by the National Arbor Day Foundation in 1990. Davis received the Indiana Journalism Award from the Ball State University Department of Journalism in 1991, and the State of Indiana named him a Distinguished Hoosier in 1992. In 1995, he received a Project Award from the National Arbor Day Foundation, and in 1997, he won an LVA Leadership Award from the Literacy Volunteers of America. In 2016, Jim was presented with an Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con International.

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