Curious Reprints

This is the Heathcliff comic from Saturday...

I saw that over the weekend and thought, "I'm pretty sure Gallagher has used that joke before." So I did a quick search on Google for Heathcliff Kermit assuming that some Muppets fan would have had it documented. Sure enough, the Muppets Wiki has a Heathcliff page showcasing various Muppet-related cameos in the comic over the years. And right in the middle is this same drawing from September 9, 2021. (Albeit with a noteably darker color palette.)

But what struck me was that the date had been changed. It wasn't that the syndicate ran the same strip on the same day just a few years apart like they do with Peanuts; the Heathcliff strip had been re-dated. September 7, 2024 versus September 9, 2021. And more curious, as I was looking down in the area of the comic anyway, I noticed that the copyright date was 2017. A little more digging later, and I came up with the strip from July 6, 2017...

Line-for-line, the exact same strip, down to Gallagher's signature. Except for the date, which seems to have been manually changed. On two separate occasins.

I don't fault Gallagher for reusing a strip like that -- reruns are nothing new in comics and neither is "repackaging" old material. Deadlines are a bitch, especially when it's every single day for years on end. And hey, sometimes crap comes up that prevents you from working your normal schedule or your brain just isn't firing on all cylanders that day or something. But I do find it interesting that these reruns appear to be one-offs (as opposed to rerunning an entire week's worth of strips or something) and that Gallagher bothered re-dating them. I don't think he's really trying to pass them off as brand new -- on both occasions, he left the 2017 copyright date in place after all -- so why change the date? Just as a way to check that the syndicate knows they're sending out the correct strip that day? Color me curious.

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