9 Greatest Garfield Comics From The 1990s That Are Pure Nostalgia

Published Aug 30, 2026, 10:00 PM EDT Nicolas Ayala is a Senior Writer for the Comics team at ScreenRant, with over five years of experience writing about Superhero media, action movies, and TV shows. Sign in to your ScreenRant account Without a doubt, the peak of Garfield's popularity took place in the 1990s, and over two decades later, many of the orange cat's best comics from that era have become nostalgic time capsules. In his earliest iterations, Jim Davis initially drew Garfield as a bulky four-legged creature with sagging jowls, a heavy snout, and tiny squinting eyes that emphasized his lethargic cat anatomy. Across the subsequent decades, Garfield's design was streamlined into an upright bipedal character with a rounded torso, large oval eyes capable of highly exaggerated cartoon expressions, and oversized human-like feet. On the other hand, Garfield’s humor has always centered on his deadpan comedy, his laziness, and his passion for annoying Jon Arbuckle and hating Odie. Just like Calvin and Hobbes' titular kid uses his transmogrifier to adopt any shape and Peanuts' Charlie Brown constantly embarrasses himself playing baseball, Jim Davis' Garfield is brimming with running gags. Garfield is famous for his inexplicable hatred for Mondays and an unhealthy obsession with lasagna, as well as for his longtime war against a tiny gray mouse and his commentary on television, which he can't stand but still spends all day watching. As is the case with all the most iconic comic strips in pop culture, Garfield's humor is timeless. That said, some strips are now showing their age, and that only makes them even better. 9 Garfield Turns The TV Set On To Warm Himself Up TV Sets Used To Be Very Different In The 1990s Garfield’s decision to power up the living room TV set strictly for warmth is a memory unique to the bulky electronics of the twentieth century. TV sets were still large enough to act as high-wattage space heaters, makeshift tables, and lounge chairs for cats. The TVs of that era were massive wooden or plastic boxes packed with heavy cathode-ray tube mechanisms, vacuum tubes, and dense glass screens that naturally radiated immense amounts of ambient heat after a few minutes of use. This scenario is impossible to replicate with the sleek display hardware of the modern era. Present-day smart TVs are designed as razor-thin vertical glass sheets that usually hang flush against the walls. Beyond the lack of physical space, modern LED, OLED, and QLED displays prioritize extreme energy efficiency, generating almost zero external heat and remaining cool to the touch even after hours of playback. The old frustrations of manual twin-lead antennas, fuzzy analog static, and loose coaxial connection cables have been replaced by a completely new suite of digital headaches, including dropped Wi-Fi signals, mandatory system firmware updates, frozen streaming software, and rapid hardware obsolescence. 8 Jon Arbuckle Scrambles Through The Newspaper To Find The Comics Section Searching For Any Type Of Content Is Far Less Troublesome Now Jon Arbuckle's frantic search through the morning paper captures an era of shared media consumption that no longer exists. This 1993 Garfield strip highlights a time when households relied on a singular, physical bundle of information delivered straight to their doorstep every single morning. Jon lists out the mandatory sections everyone in a city used to read from the exact same printed source. The visual clutter of discarded sheets scattering across the table in the middle frame was the result of a messy tactile process that has been replaced by touchscreens. Today, the unified print bundle is largely gone, replaced by smart algorithms that feed every individual an endless stream of customized news and social feeds directly on their phones. Sure, the hassle of dealing with multiple physical pages that could get broken or wet is a thing of the past, but searching for news or comic strips on a smartphone looks and feels exactly the same as any other action performed on a modern device. Besides, news and entertainment are available instantly and permanently, so the excitement of looking forward to each day's newspaper is also a distant memory now. 7 Garfield Takes A Liking For Big Shoulder Pads Shoulder Pads Have Yet To Return Since The 1990s Jon Arbuckle's cheerful telephone call to his mother highlights a wonderfully specific fashion artifact that immediately reveals the strip's release year. The sweater Jon's mom sent to Garfield is a patterned, oversized knit sweater with two massive, puffy purple spheres for shoulder pads, which Garfield admits "won him over." For audiences reviewing the joke today, seeing Garfield wearing a sweater with shoulder pads bigger than a football player's is inherently funny, but there's another layer to the gag. Readers who lived through the era may recognize this gag as a direct satire of a fashion phenomenon that dominated workspace and everyday fashion lines. The obsession with dramatic shoulder pads began in high-fashion runways before cascading heavily into mainstream retail. Since then, all kinds of 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s fashion trends have returned, including baggy denim, neon windbreakers, vintage sneakers, and even mullets. Meanwhile, the large shoulder pads have yet to signal their comeback. 6 Garfield Is Bored By Early Morning Television Thirty Years Later, Boredom Is Already A Relic Of The Past Back in 1993, the image of Garfield sitting on Jon Arbuckle's living room armchair, bored by early morning television shows was a universally relatable scenario. From the 1950s all the way through the 2000s, when the only shows broadcast during the dawn hours were dull informational segments, there was little else one could do with a television set. Audiences seeking more screen-based entertainment had to endure whatever monotonous programming network executives programmed or turn off the set entirely and find something else to do. The very concept of boredom is practically extinct in the 2020s. It's far more difficult to be bored with few entertainment options than it is to be overwhelmed with content and stimulation of all kinds. Smartphones, computers, and even newer devices like smartwatches, car displays, and smart fridges grant immediate access to an infinite source of entertainment. Algorithms specifically tailor custom feeds for immediate, non-stop consumption, completely erasing the old obligation to settle for "what's on." 5 Garfield Accidentally Dials A Foreign Number Landline Phones With Physical Keys Are A Distant Memory Garfield's enthusiastic exploration of the household telephone highlights a technological standard that completely vanished in the late 2000s. While pressing the landline's heavy buttons to play dual-tone melodies, Garfield seems to accidentally dial a number from China, leaving Jon to answer a mysterious call he didn't make. This Garfield gag relies on the physical mechanics of late-20th-century landlines, where push-button keypads were standard fixtures in every living room. These audible, musical tones remained a prominent feature of telephones through the early 2000s, finally disappearing when flat glass touchscreens replaced tactile keypads. Back then, entire families had to share the phone, which was usually placed on a table or hooked up to the living room wall. Today, smartphones don't emit musical notes when their digital keys are pressed, contacts are saved in the phones' memories, and any accidental calls are the responsibility of the phone's owner alone. 4 Jon Arbuckle Is Shocked By The TV Show Announced On The Newspaper Printed Movie And TV Schedules Are Long Forgotten Jon Arbuckle’s look of pure disbelief while scanning the newspaper is a reminder of a standard media utility that disappeared from print media. Jon consults a physical newspaper layout to discover the nightly television grid, a massive multi-page index that newspapers printed daily to help families map out their evening entertainment. Back in the 1990s, a physical newspaper was the point of contact between a home and local television stations. The concept of a rigid broadcast schedule has faded away in favor of modern streaming platforms. The 1993 layout reflects a world where missing a movie broadcast meant waiting months for a potential rerun, a challenge completely erased by digital libraries that keep thousands of titles ready for immediate, on-demand playback. This shift realized a sci-fi dream of immediate convenience, but it also erased a certain sense of shared community. When entire cities or countries were limited to a handful of daily channels, millions of people watched the exact same broadcast at the exact same hour, which sparked conversations the day after. 3 Garfield Finds No Use For The Telephone Besides Ordering Pizza 1990s Garfield Would Love Having Pizza Available At His Fingertips Garfield throws a fit when he discovers that Jon is using the landline for a standard conversation rather than using the line to contact the local pizzeria. Readers from the era may remember a world where the domestic phone had the singular function of voice communication. If a person wanted to order a hot meal, they were forced to dial a specific local number, wait for an available line, and speak out loud to a restaurant employee to dictate their order piece by piece. Today, individual mobile devices work as a portal to instant gratification, as they place an infinity of culinary choices at the user's fingertips through silent digital applications. Talking with an operator is unnecessary now, as anyone can select, customize, and purchase any meal without dialing a number. Besides, this immediate delivery infrastructure extends far beyond simple restaurant menus. Modern households can order groceries, medicine, home appliances, and even furniture directly to their doorstep without ever walking out the front door. 2 Jon Arbuckle Remembers His Dance Moves From High School The 1970s Are To The 1990s What The 1990s Are To The... 2010s!? Jon Arbuckle’s frantic rehearsal of his old school dance moves may resemble a very different decade at first sight, but the fact that Jon's teenage dance moves and fashion come directly from the 1970s clearly places this strip in the 1990s. Clad in a loud, purple-and-black checkered suit, Jon swings his hips and shouts "Boogie! Boogie! Boogie!" before a sparkling disco ball crashes straight down over his head. A person attending a high school or college reunion in 1992 would be looking back exactly fifteen to twenty years prior to rediscover the polyester disco trends of the mid-to-late 1970s. Cultural definitions of nostalgia change quietly but dramatically over time. The two-decade gap between the 1970s disco craze and Jon’s 1990s living room rehearsal is the same distance that separates modern audiences from the late 2000s. In fact, as the second half of the 2020s progresses, we're significantly further away from the 1990s than the 1970s ever were to Garfield's writing team back then. If this exact comic were modernized for a contemporary audience, Jon Arbuckle would be embarrassing Garfield by aggressively replicating viral internet dances and autotuned pop steps from the late 2000s or early 2010s. 1 Garfield And Jon Need To Have Two TV Sets In The Living Room Nobody Used To Carry TVs In Their Pockets In The 1990s Fed up with an ongoing battle over the living room remote, Jon Arbuckle storms into the room wheeling a second CRT television set on a metal rolling cart to separate their viewing habits. He assigns Garfield to the secondary screen so they can each watch their preferred broadcasts simultaneously without any further bickering. Despite having their own dedicated displays, Garfield and Jon turn their backs on their assigned screens to watch each other's programs. Funny enough, something quite different and at the same time quite similar happens regularly three decades later. Nowadays, it's common for an entire family to sit together in the same room consuming completely separate pieces of media, each in their own device. But instead of adding more bulky cathode-ray television sets to the room, each individual family member simply pulls out their sleek pocket smartphones or tablets to stream movies, browse social media, or play video games right from the comfort of the same couch. Setting up two full-sized, independent television monitors in a singular room would seem completely absurd to a modern household. Which 1990s Garfield comic is your favorite? POWERS Sarcastic humor, Laziness, Gluttony, Manipulation, Ability to outwit others, Strong determination to avoid work Franchise Garfield Birthday 1978-06-19 Height Approximately 1 foot tall (30.48 cm) Comic Books Garfield's Big, Fat, Hairy Adventure (OGN), Garfield: The Thing in the Fridge, Grumpy Cat / Garfield #2, Garfield: Unreality TV, Grumpy Cat/Garfield #1, Grumpy Cat/Garfield #3, Garfield Vol. 4: