30-plus years of ‘Garfield’ comic strips to sell at auction

DALLAS-The Associated Press

Cartoonist Jim Davis is offering up more than 11,000 “Garfield” comic strips hand-drawn on paper in an auction that will stretch into the coming years, with at least a couple of strips featuring the always-hungry orange cat with a sardonic sense of humor available weekly.

“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,” said Davis, creator of the comic strip that appears in newspapers around the world and has spawned TV shows, movies and books.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions began offering up the strips in August. The auction house is selling two daily strips each week, along with longer Sunday strips being offered during the large-scale auctions throughout the year.

The strips span from the launch of “Garfield” in 1978 to 2011, when Davis began drawing the strip digitally. He says he still draws it by hand but now it’s with a stylus on a tablet instead of on paper with a pencil, pen and brush.

Comic art collector Nagib Baltagi has purchased about 20 of the strips so far and plans to bid on more. The 36-year-old said the “Garfield” auction particularly resonated because he loved as a kid watching the cartoons and reading the books.

Brian Wiedman, a comic grader at Heritage, says the daily strips are currently selling on average from around $500 to $700, and the longer Sunday strips are selling for $1,500 to $3,000.

He said the value is often determined by “who is doing what, when and where.”

“So Garfield eating lasagna, which is a trademark for him, that would be considered kind of one of the more expensive ones,” Wiedman said.