Technically, Jim Davis has worked the same way with Garfield for over forty years. If you've seen his rough drawings, it's obvious Davis is a terrible cartoonist, but he is a decent businessman, and he has a full time staff to turn his chicken scratch drawings into something that's going to make millions in merchandising.
That might be why Chris originally majored in marketing: he thought he had come up with a good, marketable character in Sonichu, and that the money would start rolling in after he somehow persuaded (or conned) somebody into coming up with Sonichu toys, shirts, video games, you name it. It never occurred to him that almost no one was going to think any creation that's a hybrid of two different and already copyrighted characters was the next Garfield.