After nearly five decades as a cultural fixture, Garfield is entering another reset, this time by looking backward. A new comic series titled Baby Garfield revisits the character’s earliest days, reimagining the famously cynical tabby as a wide-eyed kitten. The project marks one of the more noticeable visual departures in the character’s long publishing history, not because it overturns what Garfield is, but because it reframes how readers are meant to engage with him.
Scheduled to launch on March 18, the four-issue anthology is published by BOOM! Studios and focuses on formative moments that have largely gone unexplored. The series revisits Garfield’s kittenhood through short stories that depict early milestones such as his first hairball and his first word, leaning into domestic humor rather than sharp satire. Each issue contains two stories, with creative teams including Grace Ellis and Asia Simone, as well as Michael Northrop and Rob Justus.
Visually, the most immediate change is scale and proportion. Baby Garfield presents the character with oversized eyes, a smaller body, and a rough tuft of fur, clearly signaling vulnerability rather than indifference. The design choice aligns with contemporary approaches to younger versions of legacy characters, but it also connects to Garfield’s own long history of subtle redesigns. Covers by Agnes Garbowska, Rob Justus, and Asia Simone reinforce this softer presentation without completely discarding familiar traits.
Created by Jim Davis in 1978, Garfield has never been visually static. Early strips depicted him as more overtly catlike, with later iterations emphasizing a rounder body and clearer facial expressions. Some of these changes were driven by practical constraints rather than artistic reinvention. As newspaper print sizes shrank, Garfield’s face grew larger so expressions would remain readable, particularly for older audiences. That necessity gradually became part of the character’s identity.
There is also precedent for external influence shaping Garfield’s appearance. Charles Schulz reportedly sketched an alternative take on Garfield during the strip’s early years, drawing on his own experience evolving Snoopy from a four-legged dog into a more expressive, upright figure. While Baby Garfield is not tied to that moment directly, it follows the same logic: clarity and emotional accessibility take priority over strict realism.
Narratively, the series returns to established backstory elements, including Garfield’s birth in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant and his early bond with Jon Arbuckle. Rather than expanding the mythology, the focus is on tone and perspective, offering a gentler entry point into a world long defined by sarcasm and routine dissatisfaction.
Baby Garfield does not replace the version readers know, nor does it attempt to modernize the strip’s core sensibility. Instead, it functions as a side project that highlights how adaptable the character has been over time. For a comic icon whose appeal has relied on consistency, the series serves as a reminder that even small visual shifts can recontextualize a familiar figure without rewriting his legacy.
