7. Jim Davis – $800 Million
Jim Davis wants to listen to your recent criticism of “Garfield” but he can’t hear you from atop his mountain of money.
Quick, answer this question — when is the last time you read a “Garfield” strip that you enjoyed? Can you even remember?
It doesn’t even matter. The truth is, “Garfield” hasn’t been anybody’s favorite strip for a very long time. It’s debatable if it even was ever. The most successful Garfield-related property in years has been “Garfield without Garfield,” where somebody actually made the strips better by using Photoshop to remove the title character from the strip.
There’s evidence that even Jim Davis hates Garfield. In 1989 he ran a series of strips implying that Garfield might actually be all alone in his house, hallucinating all of his friends out of hunger and fear.
And yet, years after its prime, “Garfield” remains, and the fact that it’s still syndicated in papers across the world has earned Davis an estimated $800 million dollars.
But for proof that you can make that same amount of money by ACTUALLY being funny…
