He felt that dogs were doing well, but noticed no prominent cats. Davis figured he could create a cat star, having grown up on a farm with twenty-five cats. Thus was created the character of Garfield. Garfield, the star, was based on the cats Davis grew up around; he took his name and personality from Davis' grandfather, James A. Garfield Davis, who was—in Davis' words—"a large, cantankerous man." The name Jon Arbuckle came from a 1950s coffee commercial. Jon's roommate Lyman, added to give Jon someone to talk with, carried on the name of an earlier "Gnorm Gnat" character. The final character was Lyman's dog Spot, who was later renamed Odie. From 1976 to early 1978, these characters appeared in a strip called "Jon" which also ran in the "Times". The early prototype strips were not generally well documented and were considered to be lost media until 2019 where a YouTube channel by the name of Quinton Reviews was able to retrieve several digital scans of the "Jon" publications from the Pendleton Community Library after gathering information via an obscure blogpost source within a lost media Wiki site. This strip first appeared in the "Pendleton Times" on January 8, 1976, just two weeks after "Gnorm Gnat" ended. United Feature Syndicate accepted the strip for national distribution, which had been retitled "Garfield" on September 1, 1977, in March 1978 (ending its run in the "Times" on the 2nd) and made its nationwide debut in 41 newspapers on June 19 of that year (however, after a test run, the "Chicago Sun-Times" dropped it, only to reinstate it after readers' complaints). The "Garfield" Sunday strip was launched on June 25, 1978; it was available only at a third-page size until March 22, 1981. A half-page debuted the following Sunday, March 29. The Sunday strips for March 14 and 21, 1982, tried out a unique nine-panel format, but UFS curtailed further use of it. (UFS did, however, allow Davis to use the format for his later "U.S. Acres" strip.) The strip underwent stylistic changes, evolving from the style of the 1976–83 strips, to a more cartoonish look from 1984 onward. This change has mainly affected Garfield's design, which underwent a "Darwinian evolution" in which he began walking on his hind legs, "slimmed down", and "stopped looking ... through squinty little eyes" His evolution, according to Davis, was to make it easier to "push Odie off the table" or "reach for a piece of pie."