This One is Not About Jane Austen

I will only update you here where I’m at and then move on to more important things: cartoon orange cats not named Garfield. We’ll get to it.

On Sunday I finished Sense and Sensibility, which concludes my reading of the published catalog with one week to spare. It’s not all of her writings. There’s the Juvenilia, which are short stories, poems, and outlines from her early years (11-18), and her unfinished novel Sanditon that I haven’t gotten into. I’m not saying I never will get there but it wasn’t part of the assignment. I also watched the 2007 BBC Northanger Abbey adaptation starring Felicity Jones of Rogue One fame (loved it) and Austenland (liked it). And while this is the conclusion of my report on the subject for the sake of this post I am forever willing to discuss any and all of these books and shows at length.

This is going to be understandably jarring as I transition from 1800s fiction to a character named Heathcliff. I am not referring to the character from Wuthering Heights, which I am told by commercials is also the number one movie in the world right now. I am talking about Heathcliff, the cartoon cat. You will be forgiven for either not knowing this rascal of a tabby exists at all, or for being surprised that the intellectual property is still a going concern. The funny pages are not at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist to say the very least. For those of us whose humor was shaped by The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, this is sad. There are glimpses of greatness still. Real groundbreaking work. Check out New Nancy, for example. Or if you’re weird, try Heathcliff.

Why am I talking about this? Because this interview with its current artist and writer is one of the most inspiring things I’ve read in some time.

You may be demanding context, and you’d be right to do so. Unless you are very online, you may not know that Heathcliff is currently one of the strangest pieces of mainstream media going. I don’t know what the laws are for reposting comic strips, so I will direct you to this article where you can see what we’re talking about here. My metrics say that very few of you click links, but I have to be so real right now: this is one you should click on, otherwise little else I talk about today will make any sense. If you are a hyper-fixater like I am, I direct you to the entirety of “Heathcliff Week,” by the literary magazine Solrad. That a literary magazine dedicated to comic strips exists makes me sometimes glad, in spite of all of it, to live in the 2020s.

Some of you will still not read it, so I will try to explain a couple of the Heathcliff comics therein. One is Heathcliff the cat driving a military style tank through a small town. On the side of the tank is the word “meat.” Heathcliff is wearing a helmet that says “meat.” There is a flag flying from the tank that says “meat.” Two butchers stand outside of a building with a sign on the top that says “meat.” In the foreground, adoring children cheer. The caption says, “Children love the meat tank.” This description does not capture the deadpan expression Heathcliff always wears, the equivalent of a real cat staring right at your face while knocking a glass of juice onto a borrowed book.

Kids Love the Meat Tank went super viral on social media and the bizarre, surrealist work that undoubtedly perplexed many a grandfather started reaching the audience it deserved. Iconoclasts and meat tank fans rejoiced.

Another comic: an old man is grumpily talking to a Heathcliff who is wearing blue jeans. Two mice are also strolling by in the foreground, they are wearing blue jeans. The caption says “Enough with the jeans.” I can’t explain why the joke is made in the composition of the panel, but it is.

It gets even more confusing when you read several, because some days do feature a traditional funny page joke, and then the next will be a lovecraftian glimpse into a world where there are no rules, one we have no way of contextualizing. The Heathcliff universe may appear, at a glance, just like ours. It’s definitively not. And it is in this near-simulacrum that the uncanny valley between our reality and Heathcliff’s confounds us. Nothing is explained. But over time, it makes a kind of sense. It’s self-referential to past jokes and characters in a way that I wouldn’t dare do in a social media video. The cartoonist knows this is the first time someone may read it, knows they will be flummoxed, and publishes it anyway. There is a trust and beauty in that; it staggers me.

I won’t keep doing this, but there was “dirt week,” in which every cartoon of the week was about a pile of dirt. There are “bro fish,” who are fish who only say “bro.” Heathcliff also has some cat friends who are also “bros” and ride around in a blimp that says “bro” on it. They seem to be a bad influence? Heathcliff’s dad is a career criminal who is always depicted wearing prison stripes. There’s a mythical creature who brings delicious garbage to town called Garbage Ape, who is celebrated as a folk hero on the level of Santa Claus. Heathcliff is the promoter for a frog named Jimmy. In spite of all evidence, Heathcliff seems sure that Jimmy is going to hit it big. We don’t know for sure, because we never know what Heathcliff is thinking and while other animals talk, he never does. Though he acts and is acted upon, his own inner process is deliciously opaque. The closest we get to knowing what is going on in the feline brain is his endorsement of something, like ham, via a helmet that says “ham.”

Every Heathcliff cartoon feels like a secret code to someone who is not you. Over time you start to think you see the code, and then something will show up that shows you have only begun. You learn by context. At first, it’s perplexing. How does someone get paid for this? It becomes infuriating. For some, it stays that way for ever. For others, maybe 20 comics in, it becomes something that makes us laugh so hard that we start to cry and cough and nose run and barely breathe. I laugh in a way that embarrasses my wife. I can think of few things on this earth that delight me more than whatever the hell Peter Gallagher is doing.

This was way too much explanation. You don’t have to like the comic to get value out of the interview. Indeed, the single-panel comic may make you angry, like it does many readers. I think this resonates for all kinds of art. It ain’t for everyone. It may not even be for most people. It doesn’t have to be.

Gallagher took over his uncles’ comic strip in 1998. It was started in 1973 and predated Garfield. It was pretty much what you’d expect it to be: an alley cat who gets up to mischief. He collected intact fish skeletons and used garbage can lids as a plate. He wailed on fences in the middle of the night. His girlfriend was a chubby Persian. He had a rival dog neighbor, and a little girl lived nearby who liked to dress him in baby clothes. I grew up on the cartoon, which was half Heathcliff, and half (the much cooler in my opinion) Rifraff and the Catillac Cats. It was OK.

In other hands, Heathcliff would have gone the way of the rest of the legacy strips on the funny pages. Your Wizards of Id, your Hagars the Horrible. Your Blondies. Weak puns, outdated boomer humor observations about how hard it is to get a regular cup of coffee or middle-aged men hating their wives, repetition of jokes that have been around pretty much untouched since at least vaudeville. Instead it went <ahem> ham.

Reading this interview while on a hiatus from content creation was so helpful. This whole month I’ve been evaluating whether I want to keep doing it or just quit. I’ve seen people walk away from audiences ten times as large as mine and they seem to be doing fine. This month I’ve been doing fine. I look forward to coming back to social media next week to see what you all are posting, but kind of dread feeling like I need to make posts. I found some wisdom here. It’s been repeated to the point of being trite, but Jimmy Eat World is right. Don’t write yourself off yet. Do everything you can. Be yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s good enough for someone else.

When I started making videos on Tik Tok there were so many throwaway attempts to see what stuck. When something finally stuck, I also got stuck. Because I spent all my time trying to recreate that magic. It’s dumb, though, because the posts that I’ve had the most success from are ones I thought were too silly to even post. My biggest one, the one celebrities shared and got me probably three quarters of my following by itself, sat in my drafts for days because I was too embarrassed to put it out there. But now I put so much work into each post that when they underperform to my standards it’s devastating. Putting in that kind of work is valuable for me. I learn about my expertise and stay sharp about current scholarship. And though they don’t go viral, they seem to resonate with people.

I’m learning this with pottery, too. When I first started I recycled everything I threw. My attitude was that I didn’t want to waste trimming time and glaze on something I didn’t think was great and it was going to take a lot of practice throwing before I made anything worthwhile. But then the first bisque fire I didn’t have anything to glaze. I helped Kristin glaze her pots and had so much fun that I started keeping everything I threw as something I can practice the next skills on. I was pleasantly surprised to find that things that I thought were bad looked pretty good the next week because some magic happened while trimming, and then looked great (to me) after glazing. Pottery I made that I didn’t think was worth giving away were the first things people picked out of the box when offered. Conversely some pots I remembered being better the week before were kind of disappointing when I saw them again, and ultimately didn’t work out. When you’re just learning how to do something, you can’t get hung up on nailing it every time. I don’t think even experts can expect that. There’s wisdom in knowing you have to finish this one thing because you need to make another thing after.

I think anyone who creates anything, who tries to sell it at a farmer’s market or a gallery or on Etsy or whatever, starts getting a voice in their head based on critics you were never creating for in the first place. Someone looking at your wares and saying to their friend, “who would buy this?” resonates in your mind for ten times as long as the one who picked something up and handed you cash for it without saying anything. But the latter is your audience and the former never will be. It’s stifling to listen to that voice, because you start to self-censor for no reason to please someone who you have no business trying to convince. What if someone misinterprets this? They will. That’s got to be OK, at least if you want to do something new. They may find something of value there that you never intended. That rules.

The Middle wasn’t the lead single on Bleed American, which in itself was an album released after two failed records with a major studio. Adkins wrote it in response to a fan letter from a junior high girl whose friends said she wasn’t punk enough (this was a major concern in the 90s). He thought it was so simple, the band wouldn’t even agree to play it. It turns out it’s not just junior high kids who need a pep talk.

At the time of its release, the members of the band were selling art supplies, auto parts, doing construction, or working at a car dealership. By touring, they were able to buy back their catalog from management–a hugely important move given how big they eventually broke out–and fund a new record. But money was so tight that the album’s producer worked for free.

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but I think about those guys a lot. This summer I’ll see them tour Bleed American in its entirety for its 25th anniversary. I know people will say “there’s no way that album is that old,” but I did the math and it checks out. When it came out I was 21 and I’m 46 now. It’s a particularly memorable time in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing (less, even, than now). I was studying creative writing in college, getting married, working one full time job and one part time job, and trying to survive without any idea of how. Looking back at my whole career, it felt like I was throwing darts at a wall and seeing what would stick. Pretty much nothing did for a good 15 years. Now I have a 401k!

Both when I was studying writing and then when I moved to ecology, I was told that they weren’t practical careers but look at me now, writing for free to 400 people. Take that, college advisors. For one college semester, I abandoned my dream path to pursue a degree in website design. That’s kind of funny to remember. I wonder how that would have turned out.

Ultimately the conclusion I can reach is that people who want to create, can’t stop creating. It’s not in their DNA. Most of it does not resonate with anyone. We’re lucky if even one thing we make pleases even one other person. We’re really lucky if it manages to please millions, and to do that once is almost astonishingly rare. Finding people who keep finding what you’re doing is that much more unique. I need to work on a mindset that once it’s out there, it belongs to anyone who is interested.

In summary: thank you for being here. I hope I can share some good pottery soon.