Sunday, June 28, 2009 Heathcliff the Cat Analyzed

In this Heathcliff comic, a mouse sees Heathcliff's disembodied head appear from around the corner. Frightened, the mouse retreats into a tunnel-like opening in the wall in panel two. Panel three sees Heathcliff assuming a catlike pose near the opening in the wall. Panel four is an exact duplicate of panel three, and therefore a waste of ink. Panel five is also a copy of panel three, except that after wasting ink on panel four, the artist has apparently run short. Consequently, both Heathcliff and the wall have lost their color. In panel six, Heathcliff has regained his color and, sitting on his haunches, he looks at a watch attached to his front leg. In panels seven, eight and nine, Heathcliff assumes the characteristics of a biped. Entering another room, he borrows a joke from the old Ralph Wolf & Sam Sheepdog cartoons, picking up a time card and punching a time clock. In the final panel, we see that Heathcliff, having clocked out, has inexplicably returned to his workplace to go to sleep. Next to him, a mouse is speaking to a floating mouse head, saying "It's safe once he goes off duty."

The most disturbing thing about this comic (apart from the floating heads and the waste of ink), is the fact that Heathcliff, incapable of uttering an intelligible word, is on someone's payroll, while the mouse, seeming to be quite fluent in English, is forced to live in a hole in the wall. But I guess this is typical of life, where the talented go unnoticed while the inept become successful.