YMMV / Heathcliff

• Adaptation Displacement: More people are familiar with the DiC cartoon than the comic strip or Ruby-Spears series.
• Bile Fascination: For /co/, to the point where Heathcliff threads are a regular occurrence on there.
• Common Knowledge: Due to Garfield's fame, It is common to see people assume Heathcliff to be a rip-off of Garfield. However, Heathcliff actually predates Garfield by 5 years. Heathcliff also has little-to-nothing in common with Garfield outside of looks.
• Epileptic Trees: A common fan theory is that Heathcliff is the in-universe comic strip that Jon Arbuckle writes based on his cat, Garfield.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Garfield, to the point where Robot Chicken even acknowledged the similarities between the two cats. It's even been acknowledged in-strip. Several times.
• Friendly Fandoms: That said, there's no real friction between fans of Garfield and Heathcliff, primarily because they're both very different cats save species and color.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The entire comic rose to online fame around the late 2010s and early 2020s for its strangely Dadaist nature, especially when the "actual heathcliff comics" Twitter account was created, which caused several of the comic's more peculiar gags — such as the various name-labeled helmets that various characters wear, Heathcliff riding across town in a meat tank, Heathcliff hyping up a frog named Jimmy, and the garbage ape — to become inside jokes among a certain subset of the Internet.
  • The infamous I'M BAD NEWS panel.
  • Orkliff, the process of re-mixing Heathcliff comics by giving them a Warhammer 40,000 theme.
  • "I'm thinking of unfriending him on Facebook."
• Only the Creator Does It Right: Some fans of the strip feel that it declined after Peter Gallagher took over.
• Quirky Work: This is a very bizarre comic strip. According to Gallagher, he just tries to avoid "typical punchlines" and has a strange sense of humor.

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