Garfield has a big presence in Hey, Cat. What can I do? Garfield is the big dog in cat comics. Garfield is ubiquitous, omnipresent. Garfield is us.
It was important to me to spend a little more time on Heathcliff, the underdog cat. I grew up reading Heathcliff comics in the paper just like I grew up reading Garfield. Hell, Heathcliff & Garfield both had a Saturday morning cartoon show when I was growing up. I like Heathcliff. But I stopped reading newspaper comics regularly like 20 years ago.
I got back into having awareness of Heathcliff a few years back because I’d started to see Heathcliff comic strips on Twitter. I think it was the run of panels about the Garbage Ape. I appreciated how the comic had turned into something different, but not in the way legacy strips usually do when another cartoonist takes over the strip after the original creator dies. I appreciate how 6/7 days of the week I can read Heathcliff & it’s something I never would have thought to write or draw.
A good way for me to justify all the “research” that went into making this comic was to create my own bootleg cat character, Grumpton! I based the design on an amalgam of several of the cat characters on the cat comic timeline in the first panel of today’s comic. It’s so much fun to do dumb stuff like this that I kind of want to spin Grumpton off into a standalone comic book.
