250px|right Tumbleweeds was a popular long-run comic strip which offered a skewed perspective on life in the Old West. Writer-artist Tom K. Ryan (1926 - ) (who signed the strip "T.K. Ryan") was very familiar with conventions of the Western genre he satirized. Launched September 1965, the strip was distributed for decades initially by the Register and Tribune Syndicate and later by the King Features Syndicate after its acquisition. Jim Davis, who created Garfield, was Ryan's assistant (from 1969 to 1978) while developing another strip, Gnorm Gnat.