Heathcliff
Comic 1973 · Heathcliff (George Gately comic strip)
Orange tabby alley-cat antihero whose neighbourhood feuds, dumpster raids, and mailbox attacks predate Garfield by five years.
Created by George Gately and first syndicated by McNaught Syndicate on 3 September 1973 — five years before Garfield — Heathcliff is the original modern comic-strip alley cat. Where Garfield is housebound and lazy, Heathcliff is feral, neighbourhood-aware, and almost always involved in trouble: stealing fish from Mr. Schultz's fish market, fighting Spike the dog, terrorising the local mailman. The strip was adapted into two animated TV series (1980 and 1984), with the 1984 version pairing Heathcliff with the Catillac Cats — alley cats in a flying car. After Gately's retirement in 1998, his nephew Peter Gallagher took over the strip, which still runs today.
0 words. Sources: see /methodology.
Tags
orange
tabby
fictional
comic-strip
garfield-precursor
Names like Heathcliff
Browse cat names matching Heathcliff and discover meaning, origin, and related names → see the Heathcliff name page.
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