Like Look Who’s Here, the Family Circus collection I read before this book, I could not find the book listed in a Good Book Hunting report, and it is in really good shape, so I think I bought it for my boys a decade ago and they didn’t read it a bunch. Which is a shame: Heathcliff was fairly big in the 1980s–I remember watching the cartoon series, and we took the St. Louis Post-Dispatch which included it. So perhaps it was just big for me in that moment of my youth. Apparently, it’s still in syndication, although not in The Licking News, the only paper I took until recently which had a comics page.
Ah, gentle reader. Unlike The Family Circus, I’ve read a lot of Heathcliff collections over the years, including:
- Sweet, Savage Heathcliff in 2008
- Heathcliff Strikes Again in 2009
- Heathcliff At Home in 2012
- Heathcliff Round 3 in 2013
- Heathcliff Tresure Chest in 2013
- Heathcliff Smooth Sailing in 2015
And the Heathcliff comic book I received for my birthday this year (not reviewed).
Although this book was published in 1984, the copyright dates and the dates on the comic panels themselves indicate 1976 and 1977, and we even have a couple bicentennial-themed panels. Which means that they’re fifty years old now, but aren’t we all?
If you know Heathcliff, you know what you’re going to get: He’s going to dump trash cans (which is what we used back then instead of wheeled bins); he’s going to woo Sonya; he’s going to fight Spike; he’s going to sing on the back fence; and so on. According to Wikipedia, the comic only started in 1973, so it’s very early in the run, so everything feels fresh and not dialed in. Of course, I’ve not read a collection of the paper cartoons in eleven years, so all the tropes would seem kinda fresh just because I’m older than the cartoon itself (aren’t we all? If not, do not taunt in the comments). I probably mentioned before in one of those other book reports that I favor Heathcliff over Garfield (although I have read a Garfield collection in my time) because Heathcliff is more of a Byronic hero than Garfield. Well, perhaps I’m trying too hard when I say “Byronic,” but he definitely was more dynamic.
Ah, gentle reader. That’s really all I have to say about that, and, good news/bad news: I have several more collections I will probably knock off in short order, which is good for the annual book count but I’ll probably have as little to say about them as I do about these last two.
