Heathcliff Explained

Created by George Gately / Drawn by Peter Gallagher / Explained by Colette Arrand

[phonyhulkamania]

[heathcliffexplained]

Heathcliff is perched on the top rope of a wrestling ring in full lucha libre attire, ready to strike with a devastating tope, and this man’s reaction is not “oh shit I’d better get my dog out of here before that cat does something crazy” but “hey bud, you wanna wrestle this guy?” True carnie sleazeoid management here — he’ll probably convince his dog to put his hair on the line against Heathcliff’s mask and bet against his pal on Draftkings.

[heathcliffexplained]

Step one of Heathcliff’s plan, flooding the birdbath with plain kefir and leaving it out in the sun, worked to perfection. The second part of his plan, diving at the birds with blender in hand, was doomed to failure. Not only could the birds just fly upwards, as they did here, leaving Heathcliff covered in yogurt, he forgot to take the lid off the blender.

[meltycatcafe]

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.

[heathcliffexplained]

There is, I suppose, a Herzogian means of interpreting this image, which is to say that the human inclination to explain the behavior of beasts via our own humanity is a futile means of comforting ourselves in the face of the truth, which is that the universe is chaotic and brutal and devoid of sense … and also that these cats are either insane or scions of a future in which humans have burned themselves off the face of the earth like an unwanted tattoo, leaving our old signs in the paws of creatures who were incurious about them during our lifetime but who got bored enough in their dominance of this rock to treat them as raw material for their own crude society, clay shaped for the sake of a future none of us will glimpse. Both of those things at once.

[heathcliffexplained]

Step one of Heathcliff’s plan, flooding the birdbath with plain kefir and leaving it out in the sun, worked to perfection. The second part of his plan, diving at the birds with blender in hand, was doomed to failure. Not only could the birds just fly upwards, as they did here, leaving Heathcliff covered in yogurt, he forgot to take the lid off the blender.

[heathcliffexplained]

Grandpa Nutmeg is being unfair to practitioners of artist management, many of whom, like his cat, are clearly capable of making art. If Grandpa Nutmeg were a manager he’d be making 10% off of that Jimmy statue, but maybe that’s the thing: 10% of the nothing Heathcliff brings in off of Jimmy is zero dollars.

[heathcliffexplained]

The Nutmegs have had mice for so long that they came to the same consciousness Adam and Eve did post-apple, recognizing their nakedness and, in their shame, invented clothes to cover it. The society that invention created is now far along enough that the garments they’re producing are miniature facsimiles of our clothes — the t-shirt, the cami, the denim short. Mrs. Nutmeg is angry about this rather awe-inspiring turn of events that is localized entirely within the walls of her house, so I assume that hosting a mouse civilization’s industrial concerns, like their garment factories, are murder on her power bill.

[heathcliffexplained]

It’s one of those days when Grandpa Nutmeg is forced to carry Heathcliff around on his bald pate like a Remy Ratatouille who wants to pilot his fleshy mech to the couch so they can both watch Wheel of Fortune but can’t, either because there’s not enough hair on Grandpa Nutmeg’s head to steer him home, or because it’s a workday. The businessman hanging out at the bus stop with Grandpa Nutmeg does not own the cat on his head — he was just taking the bus to downtown Westfinster to get used to his new neighborhood, something his wife probably suggested to keep him out of the house as much as possible, when he saw this pension-age lunchpailer stroll up to the stop with a cat on his head. “Must be some kind of local custom,” he thought, picking up a stray from the ground to fit in with Grandpa Nutmeg. He has no idea how strange his world is about to become. He hasn’t even met the Garbage Ape or visited the Meat Museum. He’s just a guy on a “when in Rome” kick, unaware that Rome has been sacked and laid to waste decades ago, that only weird, fucked up fruit emerges from its salted earth. When a Ham Robot destroys his home he’ll beg the guys at the gum store to give him the kind that makes you fly and they’ll look with pity upon him, this fuckin’ guy with a cat on his head, and say that gum can’t do that, that he’s shackled to this place, no chance of escape.

[colettearrand]

BURDEN OF DREAMS TEE

I always forget about Tumblr when I'm making new stuff — my bad, those of you who are still on this platform. My partner and I are making this shirt based on the documentary Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcaraldo. It costs $28. I am placing the order tomorrow, 12/4. Please pop on over to my webstore and place a preorder if you want one.

BURDEN OF DREAMS TEE - $28

[heathcliffexplained]

Heathcliff is either warning his neighborhood to be wary of Detroit garage rock legends The Dirtbombs, or that he’s planted an improvised nuclear explosive device in his front yard. Mrs. Nutmeg thought Mr. Nutmeg was going to solve this problem, but considering one is just as likely to be overpowered by funk as one is the concussive force of an explosion, he’s taken to looking forlornly at his power-hungry cat from the window. 

[heathcliffexplained]

The Garbage Ape went to Walt Disney World, but judging by the look on their face, they did not have a great time. Perhaps, as they gazed into the gigantic, lifeless eyes of the gathered mascots doing their best to entertain in the heat with plastic heads the size of dishwashers strapped to their bodies, the Garbage Ape came to realize that they, too, were a kind of mascot, a simulacrum representing the joy other animals feel about the prospect of eating garbage. Maybe they went to Walt Disney World and came back wondering when Heathcliff and the other cats would come to see them as an individual. Then, like they mascot siblings in Orlando, they dutifully took their garbage cans up and went bounding through the park, the whole time dreaming of their autonomy.

(I feel kinda gross mentioning it, but I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi, and I’m trying to supplement the writing I do here and elsewhere (mostly elsewhere) with whatever I make. I’ve also started posting on Instagram if that makes it easier for you to follow.)

[heathcliffexplained]

The Meat Museum, being a large, Tuscan-columned structure with a gigantic marquee that says “MEAT MUSEUM” and the kind of staircase that would leave Rocky Balboa winded, probably didn’t require Heathcliff much research to find. He is, after all, a meat connoisseur and, unlike me, not the kind of person who types “Meat Museum” into Google because he forgot what the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavík is called.

[heathcliffexplained]

Like an emerging civilization from Star Trek, the invention of the tiny combustion engine has led to the invention of tiny engines of war. What Heathcliff has done to embolden the rats is unclear—he appears to be on a union-mandated break—but Mr. Nutmeg, who has clearly seen some shit, doesn’t seem afraid to stare death in its ridiculous eyes.

[heathcliffexplained]

The rats that live in Heathcliff’s house might be able to read, but living as they do in a loose, moneyless soviet, they’re unaware that cheese going up a point means that cheese is more expensive and that there will generally be less of it in the Nutmeg household as a result. Mr. Nutmeg somehow knows that cheese is up a point despite a rat’s ass getting all up in his eyes. 

[heathcliffexplained]

Knowing no shame in her utter defeat at the hands of the mice that are too large to live in the thin walls of her home, the regularity of their running by while company is over is such that Mrs. Nutmeg isn’t amazed that they’ve managed to build tiny combustion engines, nor that they’ve tooled the soft innards of cheese to adequately house those engines. 

Heathcliff, meanwhile, is a cat. 

[heathcliffexplained]

[heathcliffexplained]

Sure, Heathcliff and Sonja are roleplaying a Cialis commercial, but what’s more concerning is how the two have conjured up a pair of clawfoot tubs full of soaking water with no connection to the water main. Black magic begins at home, subtly.