Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.

And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like.

Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".

The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers.

I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.