Comic strips

The Weird Characters of Heathcliff

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D. D. Degg Updated: May 19, 2023 at 5:34 pm EDT 1 minute 2 comments

Tanks. Jimmy. Meat robots. These are the weirdos that make up the only extended universe that matters: Heathcliff.

If all you know about pop culture’s second most famous orange cat is that he eats fish down to the skeleton, well, that’s a good gag. But there’s more to the comic strip than that — for instance, he has a ham helmet. Also, he occasionally runs into an ape called the Garbage Ape, and he might be a god?

Josh Kurp at Uproxx talks to cartoonist Peter Gallagher about the strange animals that populate Heathcliff.

I would say probably the Garbage Ape was the first character that maybe I developed on my own, outside of the normal Heathcliff cast. Then from there, I keep trying out new characters all the time. I’m developing a couple of them now, but you never know if it’s going to work, but definitely, I think the Garbage Ape was the first one for sure.