Heathcliff is an American comic strip created by George Gately in 1973, featuring the title character, Heathcliff the orange cat.
Now written and drawn by Gately's nephew, Peter Gallagher, it is distributed to over 1,000 newspapers by Creators Syndicate, which took over the comic from McNaught Syndicate in 1988.
The strip and its title character show some resemblance to the more famous Garfield, and as such, people commonly misconstrue Heathcliff to be a knockoff; however, Heathcliff was published five years before the first nationally-syndicated Garfield strip.