heathcliff explained explained: a brief glance back at 2010s comics blogging with colette arrand
Colette Arrand is many things. She is a poet and the author of the book Hold Me Gorilla Monsoon. She is a ruthless wrestling critic for the website BIG EGG. She is also a crazy good zinemaker, my girlfriend, and brain behind heathcliffexplained.tumblr.com. We sat down this week to chat about her first post since 2018, AKA I started asking her a bunch of questions about her blog during one of our daily phone calls while she was dogsitting for a friend.
MCC: How would you explain Heathcliff Explained to someone who's never heard of it?
CA: Well, if you've ever seen a Heathcliff comic and been like 'what the hell is happening here', my blog offers one of an infinite number of explanations that are possible when gazing upon a single panel.
MCC: It does. The ones that involve Heathcliff's fixation with ham make me laugh the most. But why Heathcliff, and why tumblr?
CA: Well, it actually started on Blogger. (We laugh, remembering Blogger.) Back then, I wanted to have a lot of blogs doing a lot of different things. One of my favorite styles of blog at the time were ones that made fun of legacy newspaper strips, and I was looking for a strip I could do. I remembered the Heathcliff cartoon from when I was a kid. The comic strip was also featured in a West Virginia newspaper that my Great Aunt Peggy would send me clippings from. I didn't think Heathcliff was getting enough shine in the comics department, and I was right.
MCC: I never thought about Heathcliff before I started reading Heathcliff Explained. Do you think you started a Heathcliff renaissance?
CA: I don't think I started a Healthcliff renaissance, but there was and still is a comics blogging presence. I think the big one at the time was like, the Comics Curmudgeon. What made my blog different was that I was singlemindedly focused on Heathcliff – I was trying to engage with the strip's absurdity in a way that added absurdity to it.
MCC: Yes! Your art and writing have a tendency to bring fut is what made the blog catch my eye all those years ago on tumblr. It was and is so funny. So… is Heathcliff Explained back?
CA: Not really. But I think it might be fun to re-engage with comics and have something that I can do a little daily practice with. Maybe I'll advance the field of Heathcliff studies.
Follow along with Colette Arrand in 2026 and beyond at colettearrand.gay and read Heathcliff Explained at heathcliffexplained.tumblr.com.
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