Hi. I’m jason robinson aka @videocrime on twitter and most other places.
For those of you who don’t know me from my rock band, radio show, global symposium on bitcoin, brief career in music journalism or bizarro twitter feed, let me just say this right off the bat — I have a weird brain and am Extremely Online.
I’ve been on twitter since early 2009 and posted nearly 40,000 tweets on everything from the mundane (early posts in which I would complain about my job taking photos of women’s shoes for a wholesale company that was moving their product to eBay — in 2009) to the personally enriching (various posts about the process of songwriting, graphic design and internet security) to the completely absurd (re-tweets of @dril posts, attempts at my own weird sense of humor). And, having done all that on twitter, I believed, naively, that I’d see it all.
Until Saturday April 7th 2018, when I discovered what is possibly the best single-panel comic strip in the modern era.
I was doing my Saturday morning reading, taking in the sites at places like The Nib and Lifehacker and Outline, when I came across a piece by Max Genecov entitled
“LOL, CAT : The Best Internet is “Weird Heathcliff” Internet”In it, Genecov dissects a small but loyal group of insane people who still read daily gag comic “Heathcliff” in the year of our lord 2018.
But this article isn’t about that. That’s just the starting point.
Once finished with Genecov’s wild piece, I took it upon myself to
scour the internet for the
weirdest most Dada pieces of “Heathcliff” art I could find and it didn’t take long before I stumbled headfirst into the perfect comic.
Here it is in all its original glory:
That is the actual, original comic, published in American newspapers in 2013 and available on
GoComics archives forever. It was right under our noses this whole time.
[You’ll note that it’s from November 28th 2013, a week after Thanksgiving, but that’s not a crime as most syndication deals incur a 2-week delay between submission and publication.]
In it, the
titular character sits just outside the dining room where his owners’ family is about to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner, wearing a helmet that just says GRAVY on it. Someone, ostensibly the young Calvin-esque boy with his mouth open is quoted at the bottom as saying “He’s wearing the gravy helmet, again.”
“He’s wearing the gravy helmet, again.”
To my Extremely Online brain, everything about it is just perfect. The annoyed family, the helmet that says GRAVY on it, the exasperated tone of “He’s wearing the GRAVY helmet, again” — the comma between ‘helmet’ and ‘again’ just sells the whole thing. This strip exists in a strata all its own, it’s beyond the usual Garfield-level fat-cat jokes.
Garfield works on a simple level, because the cat is fat and thus will do anything for food. But there’s a darker side to Garfield that Heathcliff just doesn’t share. Here’s two examples from January and February of 1985, the height of Garfield’s popularity.
Here, both Garfield and Odie — who are normally shown as mortal enemies and whose cohabitation is more of convenience than kinship — attack Jon when he arrives home with groceries. These animals are rude, violent and uncaring about the welfare of their owner.
It’s not an isolated incident, either. Here’s another:
Here, Jon Arbuckle, a man of little means and much heart is attempting to feed his beloved Garfield. But because Garfield is a fickle creature and the food is not to his liking, Jon is injured, tripped in his own home by an ungrateful feline and Jon’s meal (a single medium-well steak with no sides) is consumed by the flabby furball instead.
Again, just two examples, because to list the times Jon has been injured, maimed or downright tortured by Garfield would take up several Wikis worth of space.
Contrast that orange tyrant with the benign harmlessness of our Good Boy Heathcliff.
Again, the Gravy Helmet Comic, for reference:
There’s a reason this joke works that goes beyond Garfield’s fat-cat hackery. Here, yes, the cat is wanting the family’s food. Here also, he is going to bizarre lengths to get it. But you’ll notice a few very important differences.
The joke
itself isn’t that Heathcliff is fat and therefore will do anything for food. The joke is only this — the cat has a helmet that says GRAVY on it and he wears it so often that his family is really annoyed by him wearing his GRAVY helmet. Again. That’s the joke.
You’ll hopefully have noticed here that Heathcliff is a perfectly behaved boy — he’s not begging or chasing anyone with the food. This is a particularly well-trained Good Boy who knows that getting treats as a cat is not about bugging people while they’re carrying dinner to the table. He’s patient, but he makes his desire clear.
This Good Boy who Wants Treats doesn’t communicate without some sort of visual aid. So rather than pounce or sneak or beg, he simply dons a helmet that says GRAVY and the whole room knows exactly what he’s saying and what he wants.
A note on the helmets — In the history of the Heathcliffverse, it’s a well-established trope that he communicates his desires via helmets.
He has one for HAM:
Correction, he has a yellow one that says HAM too, as well as a HAM flag. He also appears to have made HAM helmets for the whole family.
He even tried his hand at a bit of a side-hustle, selling helmets that say KALE:
There’s even festive ones that just say NO.
So Heathcliff, knowing that Thanksgiving is coming, sits in his spot and dons his GRAVY helmet and waits. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. The family knows he wears helmets, he’s got one for many occasions and this time — welp, it’s the gravy helmet. He’s done it again.
“He’s wearing the gravy helmet, again.”
It continues to break down like this the further you go into the Heathcliff vortex, so I will leave you with one last thought.
“He’s wearing the gravy helmet, again.”
Right there is a joke that contains only six words. (Seven if you count the word GRAVY on Heathcliff’s helmet, which, in a comic is kind of cheating, plus that’s counting GRAVY twice.)
In six words, this joke is funnier than the longest rant from Tim Buckley or Bruce Tinsley.
In six words, I have found the antics of an orange cat immensely enjoyable and I have come back to it time and time again, finding more questions than I arrived with.
This is what economy of language can afford you.
“He’s wearing the gravy helmet, again.”
A masterpiece.
