Artistically caged

Of course Peter Gallagher knows that "dank" is a weed thing. He also knows that "in heat" is a sex thing and that when aliens "probe" someone it's in the anus.

These are words, not things. Heathcliff is a comic about symbols.

You're never going to get a comic where an alien actually probes someone any more than you're going to get a comic where the Man-Eating Giant eats a man. You're just going to get a dozen comics where aliens like the word "probe".

Heathcliff wears the ham helmet because it's the helmet you wear when you eat a ham. You can tell it's that helmet because it says "ham" on it. The helmet's function is determined not by its form but by its label.

summer = beach = sand = desert = mummy and thus there is the Summer Mummy. Because of symbolic associations that do not otherwise cohere.

Robots don't wear clothes but the mere act of labeling them "nude" makes them nude. And once a painting is a nude painting there has to be a fig leaf because a "nude" without a "figleaf" is "indecent".

Thought about it for a while and really it doesn't seem this way to me at all! It's more like a poor man's… website header, or something

That's the well-adjusted way to use it. But what I did was that I made this post:

and it got literally zero notes, which was a shame, because it seemed like it should have broad appeal. I've posted other sentences on my weblog that I like more but this particular one is bait for Tumblr users who either have something wrong with them or believe they have something wrong with them or believe their favorite fictional character has something wrong with them.

And I thought that if I pinned it to keep showing it to random visitors of my blog then somebody would bite and start the feedback loop that gives it a six-digit note count.

And it worked!