Jonathan Q. Arbuckle is a character from the newspaper comic strip Garfield. He is a nerdy, clumsy man who is Garfield and Odie's owner. He is usually depicted as an awkward geek with a lack of social skills and bad taste in fashion. At the beginning of the strip's run, it was mentioned that Jon worked as a cartoonist; this aspect of his character has rarely been mentioned in the strip since then, though he is still shown to have that occupation in the Garfield television shows and comic books.
Appearance[]
Jon is a Caucasian adult man with curly, messy brown hair with a black mullet. While he wears shirts of different colors, he is most frequently seen in his signature powder blue polo top. He also wears dark blue pants (in older appearances, he wore black pants) and brown shoes. In Garfield and Friends, he often wore brown pants with a darker blue shirt. He is often seen wearing suits when he goes on dates. The suits are often composed of clothing items with patterns such as polka dots, plaid, and stripes, and usually have bright, clashing colors. In the May 18, 1992 comic strip, it is revealed that Jon owns contact lenses, but it is unclear how often he wears them or why he needs them. In the April 29, 2017 comic strip, Jon's eyes appear to be green; it is unclear if this is his natural eye color or the color of his contacts.
Personality[]
Before he met Liz, Jon consistently failed to date any woman. This has been partly due to ridiculous pick-up lines, lack of social skills, his entire wardrobe of incredibly weird, flashy outfits, and his general awkwardness. A consistent running gag is Garfield coming back from a New Year's Eve party and asking how a solitary Jon enjoyed his TV movie and microwave popcorn. Every Friday night, he would invite Garfield to undertake in his Friday night festivities instead of inviting whichever woman he was trying to hook up with. Otherwise, he would solely stare at his phone, desperately waiting in vain for a woman to call him.[Citation needed] Jon's oddness and horrible fashion sense has often been the subject of teasing or outright mockery, usually from Garfield, as one of the major running gags in the series.[1][2][3][4]
Jon has a longstanding crush on Garfield's veterinarian, Dr. Liz Wilson.[Citation needed] Although she has a deadpan, sardonic persona, she finds Jon's outlandish and goofball behavior endearing on occasion. Jon often attempts to ask her out on a date but rarely succeeds, usually due to his lack of fashion sense, with Garfield making fun of his failure as a result; however, in an extended story arc from June 20 to July 29, 2006, Liz finally admitted she was in love with him and became his girlfriend from that point on.[Citation needed] As early as 1982, Davis had suggested he would eventually bring Jon and Liz together as a couple.[5]
Despite his somewhat timid and honest nature, Jon is sometimes shown to be quite assertive on Garfield and Friends. Additionally, he shows a tendency to be a miser, as Garfield mentions how Jon passes out seeing the rates on a parking meter.[Citation needed]
Development[]
The character of Jon Arbuckle was originally envisioned by Jim Davis as an author surrogate and was the primary character of the comic strip Jon, created by Davis in 1976 and syndicated locally in the Indiana newspaper The Pendleton Times. Jon featured Jon Arbuckle alongside his pet cat, garfield, and a dog named "Spot", who would eventually evolve into Odie. Davis eventually decided to replace Jon with Garfield as the main character, with the renamed Garfield strip achieving national syndication in 1978.[6]
References[]
- ↑ "Garfield | Daily Comic Strip on May 19th, 2006" (2019-08-07).
- ↑ "Garfield | Daily Comic Strip on June 3rd, 2006" (2019-08-07).
- ↑ "Garfield | Daily Comic Strip on January 10th, 2002" (2019-08-07).
- ↑ "Garfield | Daily Comic Strip on October 31st, 2014" (2018-12-01).
- ↑ Shapiro, Walter (December 12, 1982). "LIVES: The Cat That Rots the Intellect". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 23, 2019.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
- ↑ "The Bizarre History of Garfield". Grunge (February 22, 2022). Retrieved on March 2, 2022.
External links[]
