Here's a brief interview with Jim Davis on the occasion of Garfield's 40th anniversary…
And yes, I've spent a fair amount of time at Paws HQ in Muncie and in the conference room you see in this video. Part of it is a museum of Garfield merchandise and when I'm there, I'm always struck by how well-made and well-designed it all is. As I mentioned here, when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, there were people there who didn't care if a Scooby Doo t-shirt was badly drawn or made out of shoddy materials by child labor getting paid a dime an hour someplace. Jim really is serious about quality control.
He has endured some criticism for there being so much merchandise, much of it from folks who never let the fact that Snoopy was selling life insurance influence their opinion of Peanuts. I just think it's a fact of life that if a character is popular, there's going to be merchandise…and what's more, the people who love the property want merchandise. Someone once asked Charles Schulz about Charlie Brown knapsacks and he said something like, "I'm genuinely flattered that I created something so beloved that people want to wear it." That's how I would feel about it if I ever created something that people wanted to wear.