Bill the Cat

Bill the Cat, also known as Bill D. Cat, is a fictional cat created by cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, first appearing in his comic strip Bloom County in 1983. He was conceived as a deliberate, pointed parody of Garfield — where Jim Davis's cat is plump, sardonic and merchandisable, Bill is a hideous, matted, wild-eyed wreck of an animal, forever dishevelled, frequently comatose, and given to hacking up hairballs. His trademark utterance, a strangled "Ack!" or "Thbbft!", stands in for whatever coherent thought he has failed to produce.

Despite — or because of — being such an anti-hero, Bill became one of Bloom County's most popular characters. Over the strip's run he was killed off and revived more than once, was reincarnated in various forms, and cycled through an improbable series of careers and disasters: he served as a televangelist, was briefly a Soviet spy, ran for President of the United States as the running mate of the penguin Opus on the "Meadow Party" ticket, and repeatedly fell victim to his own drug-addled, hairball-choked incompetence. Whatever the storyline, Bill's essential nature never changed — he remained a scruffy, barely-conscious cat reacting to the world with a bewildered "Ack!"

Bill's look was itself part of the joke, a scribble of tangled fur and crossed eyes that felt like a rebuke to the smooth, licensed cuteness of mainstream cartoon cats. He appeared alongside the rest of the Bloom County ensemble — Opus the penguin, the boy Milo, the lawyer Steve Dallas — and carried over into Breathed's later strips Outland and, when Bloom County was revived decades later, into its new online run, introducing the ghastly, lovable cat to a fresh generation of readers.

As a satirical creation, Bill the Cat endures as one of the great comic-strip cats: proof that a character can be repulsive, near-mindless and almost entirely inarticulate, and still become a beloved cultural icon precisely by sending up everything a cartoon cat was supposed to be.