Garfield’s pop Jim Davis got his professional   start in cartooning with the long-running strip   'Tumbleweeds’ when he got the knack to go at a   series of his own.

      His first creation was a sarcastic bug named “Gnorm Gnat” but he was only able to sell the strip   to one paper in his native Indiana. The biggest     problem was that editors didn’t think readers could identify with bugs as characters.

    He took the five   years of rejection as a learning experience and scanned the comics’ section to discover they were  filled with strips about dogs, but none about cats.