While sharing Shana Bilbrey’s sticker collection last week I realized that we had a little bit of crossover in our collections, namely a set of Halmark Heathcliff stickers. I figured I might as well post mine, as well as my page of stickers from another famous orange feline today.
These birthday themed Heathcliff stickers came out in 1983, about a year before I ever took notice of the overbearing bully of a cat. My first introduction to the character came with the 1984 DIC cartoon Heathcliff and the Cadillac Cats, and honestly, I was way more interested in the Cadillac Cats half of the cartoon. Looking back at the cartoon, I think it’s partly because I like Three Stooges-esque aspect to the trio of cats (Hector, Wordsworth, and Mungo) that followed Riff-Raff around, but more importantly they had that swell red and white Cadillac, which could transform into other vehicles. I guess the Cadillac Cats were just a bit more dynamic than the Heathcliff shorts, enough to keep my interest at least.
Anyway, I did have a couple of those paperback-sized Heathcliff collections that I picked up through either the Troll school book club or one of the various book fairs we had in elementary school, but beyond that my heart really belonged to another tiger striped orange cat, the one and only Garfield…
Though the above stickers have a 1978 copyright date on them (and that’s the date they’re typically sold under on eBay) I believe these were probably released around 1982 or ’83 as the big lug has taken on most of his trademarked characteristics, leaving behind the much larger more realistic appearance that he had in ’78 (here’s an example from the 1st Garfield strip.) Without a doubt, Garfield was my entry point into the concept of comic art. When I first seriously took up a pencil and paper to try my hand at drawing when I was 12 years old, I turned to copying from Garfield strips (which later morphed into an odd obsession with drawing the cast of characters from the Tiny Tunes cartoon.)
What I think it kind of fitting in an odd parallel continuity sort of way is that when the Garfield and Friends cartoon came on the air, I had a very similar reaction to as I did for the Heathcliff cartoon. I was way more into the U.S. Acres shorts, though I did enjoy the Garfield bits as well. In doing a little research today I discovered that U.S. Acres wasn’t created for the cartoon, but in fact started as a daily strip by Davis (though whether or not he was only ghosting on the art and writing duties by that time is a question), though it only lasted for a few years before it was canceled. Having never read it I can’t say much about its quality, but apparently Bill Watterson called it an abomination and an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Crazy.
Well, it looks like another slim week around here, and it’ll probably be this way for the next few weeks. I’ll be leaving to go on vacation next weekend, and then the weekend after that is the big Wizard World Chicago appearance. I’m probably going to have a post about that and another Peel Here before I go, but we shall see…
