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Archive: Heathcliff

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Milky Monday

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Gil Thorp, 4/14/24

Look, my mission is as always to read the comics so you don’t have to, but sometimes with the continuity strips you really do need to read them daily, because the seemingly insignificant ones are there to set up the highlights. For instance, today’s strip, in which Marty is doing Step 9 of the twelve AA steps at the lady who took over his job and his beloved wooden crate press box, is much funnier if you had read Saturday’s strip, which establishes that he’s doing this in the middle of a game, probably in the hopes that some of his apology goes out on-air and people feel sorry for him and proud of the hard work he’s doing and give him his job back.

Heathcliff, 4/14/25

I’ve always assumed that Team Heathcliff resents Garfield at some level because, even though Heathcliff was the first orange cat comic on the block by several years, it never became the multimillion dollar marketing and merchandising juggernaut that Garfield evolved into. But then I see strips like today’s and realize that Heathcliff clings fiercely to its punk rock ethos. “You hate Mondays because you’re pandering to some sub-Dilbert level workaday everyman relatable feeling,” you can imagine Heathcliff saying here. “I love Mondays because I get to make other people hate them by ripping their face off and stealing their milk. We are not the same.”

Slylock Fox, 4/14/25

Wow, the post animalpocalypse society really is becoming more and more like ours every day, as Slylock (who I assume works for the Forestville Bureau of Investigations) becomes increasingly focused in getting one up in the bureaucratic war against the FSA (“they rely too much on high-tech gadgets and refuse to do the real legwork of law enforcement!”) and kind of forgets to do anything about Weirdly and the current giant robot situation.

Pardon My Planet, 4/14/25

Hey, man, uh, what do you think is in the milk you buy in the store. Like, for real. Because I don’t think milk works the way you think it works, like, at all?

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Gloomy Sunday

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Hi and Lois, 3/23/25

Look, you know I’m a genuine fan of Hi and Lois’s new melancholy, punchline-free vibe, but I’m sorry, “spring is here, time to ramp up our loathing of our aging bodies” is too dark and I’m going to need them to ratchet things back a bit.

Mary Worth, 3/23/25

OK, we all knew from the get-go that Wilbur’s vacation fling with funny hair was going to show up at his condo from the get-go, but I don’t think any of us could’ve predicted that she would arrive just as Wilbur was sorting through his surprisingly diverse shoe collection as part of his plan to strike the perfect balance between aesthetics and endurance for his upcoming karaoke outing. Will Belle be into Wilbur’s whole shoe deal, will she be repulsed by it as somehow unmasculine, or will she not find anything noteworthy about a bedroom with shoes strewn randomly around the floor and bed? The answer will tell us all a lot about this lady.

Heathcliff, 3/23/25

Heathcliff! You probably shouldn’t be putting forth the effort to communicate with the dog community in their own language at all, and if you’re going to stoop to that level, it should be to make them quake in fear, not chortle at your wit. You’re letting down all your dogcatcher fans!

Luann, 3/23/25

“I guess you know you’re old when you used to live in a civilization with a strong literary culture but now you need drastic pharmaceutical intervention just to stay alive.” “Ha! Under no circumstances should you put that on a t-shirt, it’s way too depressing.”

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For the birds, who are against each other

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Shoe, 3/10/25

Man, it would be concerning if you were a bird parent from a species that primarily ate fish and your son didn’t want to eat fish, especially considering that, bird-wise, the main way you get fish for your kid is to eat it yourself and then barf it up for them. I can see why you’d write a pleading letter to the editor of the local paper, though it’s pretty funny that said editor would just be like “ditch your ungrateful kid and get with a cat instead.” This may be affected by said editor’s species: Shoe is, as helpfully pointed out by a surprisingly comprehensive table on the Shoe (comic strip) Wikipedia article, a purple martin, a largely insectivore species in contrast to his fish-happy employees Cosmo Fishhawk and Loon. Everything else aside, domestic and feral cats are also one of the main predators of bird species, but the purple martin’s current conservation status is “Least Concern,” so I guess he’s not too worked up about that either.

Heathcliff, 3/10/25

Now that I’m returning to Heathcliff on the regular, I must report that it’s still following its late-era dream logic to surprising and disquieting places. Heathcliff hates dogs, sure. The local dogcatchers are a tight-knit society with their own social institutions, I buy that. Said dogcatcher community respects Heathcliff because of his aforementioned hatred of dogs, makes sense. And so they … get lower back tattoos of Heathcliff’s face? To signal all this information to one another, sexually? Yes, the chain of reasoning holds together, but if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Intelligent Life, 3/10/25

I once cruelly but accurately described Intelligent Life as being “about a number of unpleasant people who are obsessed with ‘nerd’ franchises (i.e., most of modern film and TV entertainment) in the most boring way possible.” I guess I should’ve added a compliment about its one redeeming feature, which is that it’s almost never about pissing and shitting. Too late now, I guess!

Pluggers, 3/10/25

Oh, you’re telling me that a plugger will substitute lower-cost calories when the price of a favorite foodstuff goes up? Are they ever so special and financially rational? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Professor Hal Varian, who’s written extensively on economic substitution effects?