{"id":35309,"date":"2026-06-09T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35309"},"modified":"2026-06-06T17:00:52","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T22:00:52","slug":"book-report-heathcliff-triple-threat-by-geo-gately-1984","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/09\/book-report-heathcliff-triple-threat-by-geo-gately-1984\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Heathcliff Triple Threat<\/i> by Geo Gately (1984)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/heathclifftriplethreat.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Like <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/08\/book-report-look-whos-here-by-bil-keane-1960-1972\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Look Who&#8217;s Here<\/em><\/a>, 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&#8217;t read it a bunch.  Which is a shame: Heathcliff was fairly big in the 1980s&#8211;I remember watching the cartoon series, and we took the <em>St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/em> which included it.  So perhaps it was just big for me in that moment of my youth.  Apparently, it&#8217;s still in syndication, although not in <em>The Licking News<\/em>, the only paper I took until recently which had a comics page.<\/p>\n<p>Ah, gentle reader.  Unlike The Family Circus, I&#8217;ve read a lot of Heathcliff collections over the years, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/16\/book-report-sweet-savage-heathcliff-by-geo-gately-1982\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Sweet, Savage Heathcliff<\/em><\/a> in 2008<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/15\/book-report-heathcliff-strikes-again-by-geo-gately-1984\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Heathcliff Strikes Again<\/em><\/a> in 2009<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/24\/book-report-heathcliff-at-home-by-geo-gately-1985\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Heathcliff At Home<\/em><\/a> in 2012<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/18\/book-report-heathcliff-round-3-and-heathcliff-treasure-chest-by-geo-gately-1984-1991\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Heathcliff Round 3<\/em><\/a> in 2013<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/18\/book-report-heathcliff-round-3-and-heathcliff-treasure-chest-by-geo-gately-1984-1991\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Heathcliff Tresure Chest<\/em><\/a> in 2013<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2015\/04\/16\/book-report-heathcliff-smooth-sailing-by-geo-gately-1979-1987\/\" target=\"_new\"><em>Heathcliff Smooth Sailing<\/em><\/a> in 2015<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And the Heathcliff comic book I received for my birthday <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/23\/good-birthday-receiving-2026\/\" target=\"_new\">this year<\/a> (not reviewed).<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;re fifty years old now, but aren&#8217;t we all?  <\/p>\n<p>If you know Heathcliff, you know what you&#8217;re going to get: He&#8217;s going to dump trash cans (which is what we used back then instead of wheeled bins); he&#8217;s going to woo Sonya; he&#8217;s going to fight Spike; he&#8217;s going to sing on the back fence; and so on.  According to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heathcliff_(comic_strip)\" target=\"_new\">Wikipedia<\/a>, the comic only started in 1973, so it&#8217;s very early in the run, so everything feels fresh and not dialed in.  Of course, I&#8217;ve not read a collection of the paper cartoons in eleven years, so all the tropes would seem kinda fresh just because I&#8217;m older than the cartoon itself (aren&#8217;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 href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/03\/book-reports-casual-day-has-gone-too-far-by-scott-adams-1997-and-garfield-takes-up-space-by-jim-davis-1990\/\" target=\"_new\">a Garfield collection<\/a> in my time) because Heathcliff is more of a Byronic hero than Garfield.  Well, perhaps I&#8217;m trying too hard when I say &#8220;Byronic,&#8221; but he definitely was more dynamic.<\/p>\n<p>Ah, gentle reader.  That&#8217;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&#8217;ll probably have as little to say about them as I do about these last two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like Look Who&#8217;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&#8217;t read it a bunch. Which is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35309"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35311,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35309\/revisions\/35311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}