Healthcliff Weighs in on Vance

Much has been made -- as much as can be made at any rate -- about how Peter Gallagher has taken Heathcliff in a sort of mildy surral direction over the past ten or twenty years. The gags of the strip are frequently not intended to be funny in a traditional sense, but more just an amusing juxtaposition of ideas. There's frequently not really a point to any paricular strip's message other than to showcase concepts that aren't practical or realistic. Meat-flavored gum and using an ape as a mascot to celebrate garbage collection for examples. Interestingly, however, this week's strips have been borderline political. Take a look...

You can clearly see the "cat lady" theme he's using throughout all the strips, and that basic notion of playing with a single theme for a week at a time is not uncommon for Gallagher. Not surprisingly here, given that the strip's protagonist is himself a cat, the cat lady shown in each cartoon is offered up in a heroic (to varying degrees) light. So how is this political?

About a month ago, comments from Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance resurfaced in which he complained that the US was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” This type of cat lady stereotype has long been identified as rooted in misogyny and using it in any sort of public forum like the TV interview the quote comes from, much less anything resembling political messaging that comes from a politician, is a great way to show to at least half of the electorate that you actively think little of them. Vance, in a brazenly stupid PR strategy, has not only not apologized for making an at best insensitive remark (which is what any even remotely half-intelligent public figure would do) but he's doubled-down on the idea and continued to insult women with additional derogatory "cat lady" statements.

That Gallagher has not only taken the cat lady idea as a theme, but repeatedly provided an image of cat ladies that runs 180° counter to Vance's suggests Gallagher wants to showcase how Vance's misogynistic attitudes are wrong. Do I think Gallagher is taking a formally political stance with Heathcliff here? No, not really. But it's still the most political I've seen a newspaper comic strip outside of Doonesbury for nearly 20 years.

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