On a recent afternoon, Peter Gallagher was wrapping up a lecture on Editorial Illustration, the class he has taught for 17 years at Montclair State University in northern New Jersey, when a student approached him with a burning question: “Is it true that you invented the Garbage Ape?”
When Gallagher started teaching in the late 2000s, few of his students were familiar with “Heathcliff,” the long-running, widely syndicated comic strip about a troublemaking orange cat that he had been writing and illustrating since 1998 — let alone with Garbage Ape, one of the strip’s supporting characters.
While “Heathcliff” is published seven days a week in more than 1,000 daily newspapers, that didn’t mean much for Gallagher’s students. “Kids don’t read the newspaper,” Gallagher said in a video call from his home in nearby Glen Ridge. “I don’t think they even know what a newspaper is.”
But ever since Gallagher began uploading his daily cartoons to Instagram, Bluesky and other social media platforms, he has found a new audience.
Online, “Heathcliff” is revered for its idiosyncratic brand of humor — a far cry from the more conventional stuff found in “Family Circus,” “For Better or For Worse” and “Dilbert.” While those comic strips are comfortingly familiar, Gallagher’s “Heathcliff” is defiantly bizarre.
“‘Heathcliff’ has become an inside joke extended ad nauseam for the ‘if-you-know-you-know’ era,” said Ivan Ehlers, a longtime cartoonist for The New Yorker. “One could keep a straight face and describe it as Dadaism by way of Pop Art.”
The Family Business
“Heathcliff” made its newspaper debut in 1973, five years before the first appearance of a better known comic-strip cat, Garfield. It was written and drawn by George Gately Gallagher, who signed his work George Gately. Heathcliff feasted on garbage, terrorized neighborhood dogs and indulged in pampering from his owners, the Nutmegs.
In his first appearance, the rotund Heathcliff is seated in an ice-cream parlor with Grandma Nutmeg, the family matriarch, as a waiter skeptically takes her order. “A vanilla fudge sundae and a raw fish,” the caption reads.
Gallagher, Gately’s nephew, was born in 1966, and it quickly became clear that he had inherited the family love of drawing. He showed his doodles to his uncle George and another uncle, John Gallagher, an award-winning cartoonist for magazines who would eventually join his brother in writing and drawing “Heathcliff.” The uncles often joked that Peter would take over the family business one day.
Gallagher grew more obsessed with cartooning into his adolescence and ended up at Montclair State, where he divided his time between the baseball field and the art department. After graduating in 1990, he did some illustration work for small magazines and businesses while working part time in a bookstore and a silk-screen factory.
In 1994, he started apprenticing for his uncles, workshopping “Heathcliff” jokes and training his hand in the strip’s distinctively old-fashioned aesthetic.
“Learning how to draw it was the hardest thing,” Gallagher said. “Even in the 1980s, when my friends knew that my uncles did ‘Heathcliff,’ they would joke that it looked like it was from the 1950s. But I loved that it had that out-of-date look.”
In 1998, Gallagher took over, allowing his uncles to retire.
Making It Strange
The original “Heathcliff” arrived in the heyday of newspaper comics. It wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it managed to spawn dozens of books, three TV shows, several video games and a 1986 feature film, “Heathcliff: The Movie,” featuring the voice of Mel Blanc. The New York Times review called the film “harmless enough.”
This era of “Heathcliff” was diverting, if unmemorable. When Peter Gallagher became the steward, he did his best to maintain its conventional aesthetic — although his own taste tended more toward The New Yorker than what could be found in the back pages of The Star-Ledger, his local paper.
“I sort of kept my style of humor out of ‘Heathcliff’ early on, because I was just trying to do a professional job and learn how to do it from my uncles,” Gallagher said. “But as I was doing things that were a little safer, things like my uncles would do, I was getting criticized for it. So then I decided: You know what? If I’m going to get criticized for something, I’d rather go down with the ship of my own sense of humor.”
You can trace the genesis of Gallagher’s spin on “Heathcliff” to a strip published on Oct. 24, 2007. In it, the table is set for dinner, and the Nutmeg family is serving a baked ham. Heathcliff sits nearby, wearing an oversized helmet emblazoned with the word “ham,” as the family members eye him with suspicion. The caption reads, “Watch out — he’s wearing the helmet.”
The slightly surreal, logic-defying quality of the strip began to make an impression. “I had friends calling me up saying, ‘That one was really funny,’” Gallagher recalled. “It encouraged me to keep going in that direction.”
The “Heathcliff” universe, once (relatively) realistic, soon transformed into a kind of suburban fantasyland. In a typical strip, Heathcliff is driving a tank with the word “meat” printed on the side, flanked by kids cheering him on. It should be noted that he is also wearing a helmet that says “meat.” The caption reads, “The children love the meat tank.”
In another, Heathcliff is driving a ham on wheels, wearing the “ham” helmet as he passes by a street sign that warns “Ham Limit 25.” The caption: “He’s going way over the ham limit.”
The strip’s minor characters include fish who are able to say only one word, “Bro,” and Sasquatch-like apes who carry garbage cans. Gallagher will work and rework the same gag — like the ham helmet — dozens of times, adding to the sense of the uncanny.
“‘Heathcliff’ is full of wonderfully offbeat humor,” said Ward Sutton, a cartoonist who draws parodies of unfunny editorial cartoons under the name Stan Kelly for the satirical magazine The Onion. “It’s sometimes meta, sometimes head-scratching, but most always surprising, which is a key to effective comedy.”
Not everyone likes it: Gallagher regularly fields complaints from people who say his strip makes no sense.
“Gallagher’s ‘Heathcliff’ is one of the most misunderstood comics of this era,” the cartoonist Andrew Neal said. “But the beautiful thing is, it doesn’t matter. Whether or not someone gets a ‘Heathcliff’ comic is not the most important thing about it, and I find that thrilling.”
New Frontier
Gallagher started posting his strips on social media without any real expectations — though he grasped that a single-panel strip like “Heathcliff” made for the kind of simple, shareable content that might do well online.
At the same time, the very format of the funny-page cartoon sometimes feels like it’s on the verge of extinction. “Newspapers, unfortunately, a lot of them are fading away,” Gallagher said. “Heathcliff” was recently dropped from The Los Angeles Times when the paper cut its comic section from four pages to one.
But the popularity of the strip on social media has connected Gallagher directly with his new fans. “I used to get fan mail occasionally,” he said, “but having it out there everyday, you get comments, and the comments are very nice, usually. Though some people hate it.”
He recalled a fan’s recent objection to a joke involving Heathcliff floating in the air while chewing a piece of bubble gum. “He was like, ‘I think I’ve seen him do this one 20 times!’” Gallagher said with a laugh.
I asked him if he had one more bubble gum gag in him.
“No, no,” he insisted. “I’ve got a lot more.”
When we spoke, Gallagher was in his home office, finishing up one of his Sunday strips, the longest and most labor-intensive of the seven cartoons he creates each week. Earlier this year, he conceded, he’d been experiencing some creative frustration.
“I had this feeling like every idea I was coming up with was something I had done before and wasn’t that interesting,” he said. But while brainstorming in the basement, which he calls “the Dungeon,” he had a breakthrough: a pair of miniature Heathcliffs floating around Heathcliff’s head. He calls them Heathcliff’s “cherubs.”
“Once I came up with that,” Gallagher said, “I was like, ‘All right, all right, I think I’m back on the right track.”
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