U.S. Acres


U.S. Acres was a comic strip that originally ran from 1986 to 1989, created by Jim Davis, author of the comic strip Garfield.
U.S. Acres was launched on March 3, 1986 in a then-unprecedented 505 newspapers by United Feature Syndicate. For most of the last year of the strip's existence, Brett Koth, who had been assisting Davis on Garfield at that time, was given co-creator's credit in the strip, and signed his name to the strips along with Davis. The strip was centered on a group of barnyard animals, with the main character being Orson, a small pig who had been taken from his mother shortly after being born.
At the peak of the comic's popularity, there were children's books, plush animals, and posters of the main characters. An animated adaptation was included in the TV show Garfield and Friends, as a spin-off segment, and continued to be so for several years after the strip ended, which was even lampshaded in one of the final strips. The final daily strip was printed on April 15, 1989, while the final Sunday appeared on May 7, 1989. Most papers only ran the Sunday strip, usually in the same page as Garfield.
The strip was relaunched as an online webcomic on October 1, 2010 the date going back to March 3, 2010. The relaunch was announced the day before in a question and answer column in USA Today. Later, in celebration of U.S. Acres's twenty-fourth anniversary, the strips prior to August 1, 1986 were released on Garfield.com. On August 7, 2016, a Garfield comic strip showed the U.S. Acres gang in its logo box, featuring Garfield eating a bag of chicken feed.
In August 2019, Jim Davis sold the rights to U.S. Acres to Viacom as part of its acquisition of Paws, Inc.

Comic strip collections

Five comic strip collections were published, by Topper Books of New York City.
Also, at least six comic strip collections were published by Berkley Books of New York City. However, some of these books are missing months of the strip and / or have strips out of order.
The final two months of U.S. Acres were not published as part of an American collection. The last U.S. Acres collection was published in England as a mass-market paperback, titled Orson's Farm Cuts the Corn. The collection, which has since gone out of print along with the rest of the U.S. Acres books, contains fifty-nine of the final sixty strips and is the rarest of any U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm collection.

Children's books

The primary traits of the cartoon's main characters were established during the run of the comic strip, even down to such visual gags as the head on Wade's inner tube having the same facial expression as Wade.

Primary characters

Orson Pig

Orson Pig : A bossy naïve pig whose work ethic makes him the functional leader. His good humor being tested is one of the common gags in the cartoons. In 1986, Orson had long eyelashes until they disappeared on December 31, 1987, and Booker and Sheldon called him Mom. Being the runt of his litter, Orson's original owner intended to get rid of him. Orson fell from the pick-up taking him away from his birthplace and moved to the farm known as U.S. Acres. and was later found by a farm girl who persuaded Orson to follow her to her father's farm.
Orson's alter-ego is a costumed superhero named Power Pig, which more often than not causes his friends or adversaries to fall down laughing at him. Orson loves books, but is very influenced by them, by sometimes doing what's in the book. Sometimes when Orson reads a book, particularly a scary one, the stuff he reads about usually appears behind him and scares the others away. He also disliked Roy.

Roy Rooster

Roy Rooster : The strip's antihero. Roy is a loud, wisecracking rooster who endlessly enjoys practical jokes with Wade being his favorite target. With few exceptions he is tolerated because his job of waking up everyone and 'tending' to the chickens is important, but he does his best to avoid labor whenever possible. In the cartoon, he is more well-liked by the others and is often the one to defeat the series antagonists such as Orson's brothers. In spite of his lazy nature, Roy has proven to be a very capable protector of the chickens, coolly outsmarting and defeating the predators, such as the Weasel and the Fox, that try to kidnap them with a series of practical jokes and gags. Even though he is a jerk and insults everyone, Roy is not a bully and doesn’t really mean any harm. He's allergic to flowers, a fact that was first established in a strip published on July 2, 1986.

Wade Duck

Wade Duck : Wade is the "cowardly craven duck" of the farm. His good nature is sometimes shadowed by his overwhelming hypochondria and pantophobia. Wade is always seen wearing a kiddie pool flotation inner tube, which has a duck head in front of it that shares
the same facial expressions as Wade – even down to the direction in which Wade is looking.

Booker

Booker : A chick named by Orson for the pig's love of books. Booker and Sheldon were still eggs when Orson found them abandoned and decided to hatch them. Booker is extremely adventurous and confident despite his size. He often chases worms, but can never seem to catch them. In the comic, he often called Orson "Mom."

Sheldon

Sheldon : Booker's twin brother, who decides not to hatch. He became very philosophical and introspective over the course of the strip, and began musing on his "Sanctum Sanctorum". A recurring gag is to portray his shell as the perfect living space within, without ever showing it. In one episode, the shell finally hatched, only to reveal another shell underneath.

Bo Sheep

Bo Sheep : Lanolin's brother. In the comics, he was depicted as being unintelligent and perky. However, in the TV series, he was a surfer dude and shown as not particularly bright, but always calm, cool, collected, dependable, and a great cook.

Lanolin Sheep

Lanolin Sheep : Usually shown as a hard worker, but with a personality the polar opposite of her brother: loud and disagreeable. Her name is that of the grease produced by wool-bearing animals, such as sheep. In the comic strip, she was much more abrasive than in the television series. She revealed that she has wider arms and fingers than Roy during a fight, and was the only one who could put Roy in his place. In the TV series, she was always seen doing laundry, but in one episode, Roy pointed out that none of them normally wear any clothes and wondered where all the laundry was coming from. Ironically enough, in the same episode, Roy is wearing a bathing suit.

Secondary characters