Way back when, Jim Davis (the guy what does the comical strip about the fat, lazy cat that eats lasagna) came up with a second newspaper strip, one that was originally conceived to please very young kids. It was called U.S. Acres in this country and in some other nations, it was called Orson's Farm. Over the course of its run, Jim and his associates discovered that there seemed to be no way to get children of its intended age bracket to read the funnies in the newspaper. These days, it's hard enough just to get anyone of any age to read a newspaper.
As it evolved, the content of the strip began skewing a bit older…and it was modestly successful. It was in enough papers — more than some successful features achieve. It just didn't look like enough papers compared to his other gig, Garfield…currently, the most widely-syndicated newspaper strip in the world. So Jim decided to suspend the U.S. Acres strip.
A lot of us miss those characters. I wrote their Saturday morning adventures on Garfield & Friends. They were the friends. I came to love Orson, Bo, Roy, Wade, Sheldon, Booker and the rest. (I never did get either Blue or Cody into the show.) They're not part of The Garfield Show, the new series we're doing now and many people, self included, have nagged Jim to get the farm animals back into circulation. Just to shut us up, there's now a U.S. Acres section on the Garfield website. It's a good start. Now, if they could only close one of those deals to do a new cartoon show with them…