Heathcliff King Size #32195-X
Heathcliff King Size (1977) represents one of the earliest standalone book-format collections of George Gately's newspaper strip, arriving just four years after the strip's debut and at a moment when Heathcliff was already appearing in hundreds of papers nationwide. Its publication demonstrates how quickly the strip's commercial momentum translated into mass-market trade formats, a model that would define how newspaper-comic properties were packaged for general readers throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Notably, the strip it celebrates predates Garfield by five years, making these early collections part of the documentary record of the original mischievous-orange-cat phenomenon in American funny-page culture.
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George Gately — born George Gately Gallagher in Queens, New York — launched the Heathcliff strip on September 3, 1973, through McNaught Syndicate, after earlier strips Hapless Harry and Hippy failed to break through. By 1977, demand had grown to the point that Gately was already recruiting collaborators (inker Bob Laughlin and later his brother John) to keep up with the daily and Sunday output, and the strip's publisher moved quickly to capitalize on its readership by issuing multiple paperback reprint collections that year — King Size among them — through the Ace/Tempo Books imprint under the Grosset & Dunlap umbrella.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published in 1977 by Ace/Tempo Books (a Grosset & Dunlap imprint); ISBN 044132195X also appears as 0441321968 depending on printing variant.
- Created and drawn entirely by George Gately (born George Gately Gallagher, December 21, 1928 – September 30, 2001), who dropped the surname 'Gallagher' to avoid confusion with his cartoonist brother John.
- Heathcliff the strip debuted on September 3, 1973, syndicated by McNaught Syndicate; King Size was issued during the strip's fourth year of publication.
- The book collects single-panel weekday gag strips featuring Heathcliff's encounters with mice, dogs, dog catchers, vets, fish, and an array of neighborhood characters.
- The orange cat's name was drawn directly from the antiheroic protagonist of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.
- King Size was one of three Heathcliff paperback collections released by Tempo Books in 1977 alone, alongside Rides Again and Triple Threat, reflecting the strip's rapid commercial expansion.
- The strip was running in approximately 1,000 newspapers at its mid-1970s peak, under McNaught Syndicate (which held rights until 1988).
- No dedicated comic-book publisher (Marvel, DC, or Star Comics) was involved in this edition; the Star Comics/Marvel series adapting the character did not begin until 1985.