3/1/2023 0 Comments Wierd funny pages![]() ![]() When a creator dies or retires, their successor has a built-in revenue stream from syndication with little consequence to change what they’re doing. At the same time, people who still read the newspaper go to the comics section to see the familiar faces, not new ones. In the modern era, people who want to draw comic strips will just go straight onto the internet to distribute their work rather than the newspapers. EWqhfXWpS6- Brandi, Panda Diplomacy Investigative Journalist December 9, 2017įruhlinger believes the sustained existence of Heathcliff is a consequence of inertia. Though her blog is defunct, her Heathcliff antics continue - for a time, she DM’d the strips to Anthony Scaramucci daily. “Heathcliff is terrorizing a neighborhood, getting arrested by the cops (can we talk about how animal control only goes after dogs but the regular shitty cops handle cats? And how there’s a cat prison his dad is in? And cat lawyers?),” she offers as an example. Through its lack of sense, each person has their own private understanding of the strip, and even if they’re not sure Peter Gallagher is going for some grand artistic statement, they all feel that Heathcliff is a special, frustrating, and entrancing exercise in anti-comedic anti-art, existing right there in the mainest of the mainstream.īrandi Brown, a Minneapolis comedian and proprietor of the dormant but exhaustive blog Heathcliff, For Why?, views the comic’s opacity as an opportunity to overanalyze and go down the rabbit hole. However, there exists a small but vocal contingent of mostly young, mostly internet-addled individuals who are intent on reading deeper, if unintended, meaning into Heathcliff. ![]() The only exception is of course Garfield, a strip so easy to dunk on that overweening deconstruction of the comic has become a dialect on the internet. If you don’t read the newspaper, it can feel like so-called “classic” comic strips stopped existing quite some time ago. It doesn’t seem to contain jokes per se - go through a few weeks’ worth of panels, though, and they develop an internal rhythm that doesn’t quite make sense, but nevertheless feels like it does. Gallagher’s version of Heathcliff lulls you into a state of cognitive dissonance. Josh Fruhlinger, whose blog The Comics Curmudgeon offers pithy analysis of daily newspaper comic strips, characterizes it as “a sort of standard-issue rambunctious-cat-with-recurring-characters strip that got taken over by someone whose sensibility is a little more like the Far Side, and now after some years keeps circling around the same set of 10-20 running jokes played out in endless subtle variations.” That “someone else” is Peter Gallagher, nephew of George Gately, who took over the strip in 1998 and has, in his own way, steered Heathcliff in inexplicable directions that have only gotten stranger with time. To describe the Heathcliff comic strip itself is at once simple and impossible. (Hobbes, being a tiger and also a doll, does not count.) Even though George Gately started drawing him in 1973, five years before Jim Davis debuted Garfield, Heathcliff is thought of - if he’s thought of at all - as an also-ran, perpetually in Garfield’s shadow, nothing more than (sorry) a copycat. If you encounter some kind of Highlander scenario and you need to choose one and only one orange comic strip cat to be in your life, it should be Heathcliff. ![]()
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