To George, the First Space Monkey

Hi, I'm Allie! I like lipstick, microorganisms, and the Boston Bruins. NSFW-ish, sometimes.

[great-and-small]

Texting the ecologist friend after she gave birth to ask “on a scale of kangaroo to spotted hyena how bad was it”

[alterac]

Hold on I need to look something up.

[talesfromtreatment]

You are going to regret that. My preemptive condolences.

[naamahdarling]

Fancy's first time trying fresh catnip!

[heathcliffbot]

08/13/2026

[goodluckclove]

This is the funniest fucking comic in the world to me. Everything about it is perfect. I love that it came out in 2026. I love the concept of a Dank Blimp being presented as if it’s an established concept and a coherent single-panel punchline. I love that this has all the makings of a boomer humor Kids-These-Days comic, but is executed with a non-euclidian sincerity.

I saw this last night and proceeded to spend the next hour looking up other newer Heathcliff comics and just absolutely losing my shit over them.

[hymneminium]

The Heathcliff man-eating giant comics are so good

[hymneminium]

It's common for newspaper comic characters to have a gimmick, like how Garfield hates mondays and Ignatz Mouse throws bricks and so on. And readers can tune in at any point, so each episode has to both set up the pattern and confirm it. It's funny even if it's your first time but if you've seen it before then you also get the joy of recognition.

So then Heathcliff has a "man-eating giant" character whose gimmick is that he eats human flesh, and the comics lay out that he eats human flesh and he doesn't eat anything else and the humans fear for their lives:

But of course you never see him eat any mans. It has this almost koanic quality

[heathcliffbot]

11/05/2025

[hymneminium]

The Garbage Ape is a folkloric figure made up by the cats to explain where garbage comes from. Joe Stork brings babies, the Sandman puts rheum in your eye, the Garbage Ape puts garbage cans on the sidewalk. Heathcliff cares about garbage because he’s a cat that eats out of the trash as made explicit in other comics. For trash day the Garbage Ape puts the garbage cans on the sidewalk and then the garbage men come to empty them. The only difference is that the garbage men are real. The cats don’t know the actual reason for either the appearance or the disappearance of their snacks so they made up the Garbage Ape to balance it out. There’s nothing confusing whatsoever about this comic or about the concept of Garbage Apelings.

[hymneminium]

#oh my god did gallagher just discover the term dank this is so exciting #does he know it's a weed thing?? there's no way right

Of course Peter Gallagher knows that "dank" is a weed thing. He also knows that "in heat" is a sex thing and that when aliens "probe" someone it's in the anus.

These are words, not things. Heathcliff is a comic about symbols.

You're never going to get a comic where an alien actually probes someone any more than you're going to get a comic where the Man-Eating Giant eats a man. You're just going to get a dozen comics where aliens like the word "probe".

Heathcliff wears the ham helmet because it's the helmet you wear when you eat a ham. You can tell it's that helmet because it says "ham" on it. The helmet's function is determined not by its form but by its label.

summer = beach = sand = desert = mummy and thus there is the Summer Mummy. Because of symbolic associations that do not otherwise cohere.

Robots don't wear clothes but the mere act of labeling them "nude" makes them nude. And once a painting is a nude painting there has to be a fig leaf because a "nude" without a "figleaf" is "indecent".

A "ham" is a ham even when it's a car. A yam can be a ham can be a car because "yam" sounds like "ham". Symbols have overtaken things.

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

This is certainly true, but it's important to note that the fundamental act of a Heathcliff comic strip is for a character to remark on the fact that the symbol has overtaken the reality. The meat store invites the existence of a meat container, which invites the meat tank (tank both the vehicle and the bowl) which invites the enthusiasm of children for powerful mechanical objects. However, the gesture of the strip is not complete until the human identifies the irregularity which has occurred and states it aloud for us. The human does not question it, but they do name it. "Children love the meat tank"

It's important that Heathcliff is not the one speaking. Heathcliff is the character who dives the furthest into symbols, but he does not have a voice to speak of them. He is the avatar of the symbols and he is only spoken about. We must imagine the speaking characters in Heathcliff strips as the rebellious voices of the material crying out against the tyranny of the symbolic. At every moment once we've stepped into the treacherous world of Heathcliff, we are at risk of being pulled away by the tides of free association and similarity. However, the voice calls us back. It shows us when we have slipped too far, names the distance between us and the particular and specific which we have nearly lost. Symbols in Heathcliff are powerful; they can take you almost anywhere they want to go, but that power can be revoked simply by identifying what has happened. By explaining it. Heathcliff reassures us that the physical can win out, if only we are wise enough to perceive and to speak it, against the encroachment of the symbolic. Once we stand together and name the world truly, Heathcliff is merely a cat.

[segamascott]

[nattousan]

it was not on wheat...

[nattousan]

[evergreen-femme]

had to share this

[wizardshark]

In every way this is set up to be a joke like any other short video, it even uses the trope of main character in a wig to represent their mom, but it isn't funny at all. It's just sweet and nice

[spiribia]

i wish you could tell cats your food is poison. he seems to think the issue is i've forgotten that he is my kind and loving friend. the issue is Hospital

[northirish]

The first rule of violent trench warfare is to have fun and be yourself

[northirish]

The second rule is DONT GET YOUR FUCKING FEET WET

[northirish]

Soon as the funding comes through all of my mutuals are getting new jobs

[anthraxofeffervescence]

The core conceit of Lord of the Rings is pretty funny. You are a twenty three year old in a suburb of Maine. The little bracelet in your grandpa’s attic has an inscription on it that is the password to the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. It is up to you to walk to the only hydraulic press in the world, located in Arizona, before the FBI finds the bracelet, kills you, and enslaves the suburb of Maine you currently live in

[tlirsgender]

"Why are my parents suddenly trying to be my friend now that I'm an adult??" Is crazymaking but putting together "oh, because children aren't seen as fully human so they're acceptable to abuse in a way that I'm not anymore. It was never actually about me as a person it was about children being property" may or may not feel Better. Makes sense though lol. Lmao. Everyone get more youthlib now

[tlirsgender]

Like once you really understand Being A Minor as an axis of oppression & look at things through this framework a lot of really jarring things about the transition to adulthood start making sense. Like. Damn you guys told me there was something fundamentally wrong with me but it was just because I was a child this whole time? The fuck?

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

i just apolitically killed the king like i have no agenda or whatever im just the jester here but i stabbed him anyway LOL all the courtiers and advisors are trying really hard to figure out who did it LOL all of them wanted him dead but they dont know whose scheme it was so nobody can promulgate a coherent political maneuver based on the circumstances LOL just playing my lute #MyLute

[h2ocolors-blog]

Eva Funderburgh

love her work

[s-olipsism]

she still makes these and they’ve only grown more wonderful over the years. The wood-fired surfaces really give them life.

love these lil guys

[augustarambles]

Sometimes the rats in my brain come together and start yelling “YEARNING” and in trying to appease them I ask “FOR WHAT” but they are too small so all they can say is “YEARNING” which is a very big word for such a tiny creature, even collectively

[mandyseley]

I loved this visual so much I had to doodle it.

ratratratratrat

[strawberry-crocodile]

i love when people talk about media "normalizing: whatever their personal sexual bugbear is because i just think hey remember when game of thrones was the most popular tv show in the world for like eight years and somehow failed to normalize incest? but i mean maybe a twitter artist with 2,000 total followers is gonna tip the scales