Jim Davis created the comic strip Gnorm Gnat in 1973, but syndicate editors rejected it, one saying his art and gags were good yet nobody could identify with bugs. Davis then surveyed comics and noticed that dogs were common while prominent cat characters were rare, so he built Garfield on the cats he grew up with and on his grandfather's cantankerous personality. Garfield first appeared in 1976 under the title Jon, was renamed Garfield in 1977, and was picked up by United Feature Syndicate for national distribution in 1978. The strip then grew steadily, and by 2002 it appeared in 2,570 newspapers with an estimated 263 million readers worldwide. Davis later bought back rights to his own early strips and founded Paws, Inc. to manage merchandising.

Hampi is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, with more than 1,600 surviving remains spread over 4,100 hectares. It was the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565. Travellers from Persia and Portugal described it as a prosperous, wealthy and grand city with temples, markets and farms along the Tungabhadra River. By 1500 it was estimated to be the world's second-largest city after Beijing, and probably India's richest at the time. In 1565 a coalition of Muslim sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara Empire, its capital was conquered and destroyed, and the city was left in ruins. Hampi remains a religious centre, with the active Virupaksha Temple at its heart.