This mini-essay is in response to THIS post, which explored the idea of doing a ‘Heathcliff without Heathcliff’ strip as a response to its competitor Garfield’s succesfull ‘Garfield without Garfield’ fan-made series.

Now to be frank, Heathcliff is a comic I already considered far more interesting & amusing than Garfield long ago, yet I’ve been generally disappointed by it since around 2010, and feel that creator Peter Gallagher recycles way too many jokes these days.

Which I consider to be a real shame, because for a while there he was not just evolving past the formulaic, funny-animal template his uncle George Gately started with back in 1973, but taking it to genuinely wild new heights. Indeed, starting around 2000 (I think it was), Gallagher started taking the strip in some pretty gonzo, surreal directions, breaking various comics conventions along the way, but doing so mostly successfully. In truth, he added an enormous breath of new life in to the strip as I see it. You can check this out yourself starting in 2002, HERE.

A couple years ago on Solrad there was even a pretty amazing series of unusually complimentary articles, exploring what made modern Heathcliff so unique and interesting. Those can be read HERE.

I agree a lot with @FauxPseudo@lemmy.world about this strip in question not really needing the cat’s presence to work, but what’s more interesting to me is that you can also see traces of Gallagher’s weird inventiveness going on. For example, how does one *possibly* drop a reanimated mummy (lol) in to a surfing / beach scene, and how is it that the kids view the spectacle as anything remotely ordinary? The delight here is that there’s no context whatsoever, and little of anything helpful in past strips to help explain it, other than the likelihood of the character being used before. Or quite possibly used many times, as with “The Garbage Ape” who typically runs along the streets, swinging welded-together trash cans for no apparent purpose. (I wish I was making that up)

Somehow and unexpectedly, as a one-off event, it simply works. And really, as a very occasional repeat, I think it also works. For me, where it begins to annoy is when it’s used more often that that, in which the lack of any added information & context actually works against the gag. So we rarely if ever learn anything more about the demented ape (or the surfing mummy), or see him in an amusing new light, but are still expected to be entertained as readers, so to speak. That’s kind of emblematic of the problem with modern Heathcliff, in that there’s somewhere under a known set of a ~dozen types of once-gonzo gags, with Gallagher mostly rotating endlessly between them, calling it a day and expending little if any artistic effort in the process.

Nice gig if you can get it, I suppose, and maybe that works for some readers, but personally I moved on ages ago. Still, I thought the strip had a brilliant run and evolution in the 2010’s or so, not unlike the Simpsons animated series having a great run in the 1990’s, so maybe we should just be satisfied with that?