Friday, July 3, 2009

My introduction to Heathcliff




Not long ago I decided to do a blog about the daily Marmaduke comic, after it had been brought to my attention that Marmaduke was . . . . , well, just not funny. While looking through some old Marmaduke comics I happened to come across Heathcliff the Cat. I'm now rather embarrassed that I overlooked this strip in my study of humorless comics, for it most definitely deserves a very special place of its own.

The strip shown above is the one that really got me interested in this comic. Here are some observations that I made about it.

1. The cat, Heathcliff has attached himself firmly to the head of an old man. Motion lines above and next to Heathcliff's head show that he is moving, apparently in the performance of some sort of act of perversion.

2. The old man is standing motionless, making no attempt to remove the cat from his head. This gives the impression that he is accustomed to the cat defiling his head, or possibly that he derives some pleasure from it himself.

3. An old woman is seated on the couch, observing this act of depravity. With an angry expression, she makes a completely irrelevant comment about some unidentified party always knowing when it's payday.

4. The cat responds to the woman's remark by expelling a large cotton-ball from his rear end, projecting it towards the woman's lap.

After studying this strip, my reaction was "WTF?" Not only was there no humor, but it made no sense. Thinking that this one strip was just an isolated case of egregious drivel, I looked into the comic further. My findings were that it appears to be a daily production of flagrant driveling.

Therefore, in the spirit of fairness, I firmly believe that Heathcliff deserves equal time with Marmaduke - if not more time. And so I have created this blog as well, in which I'll attempt to make in-depth analyses of this most singular comic.

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