George Gallagher

Born in 1928, George "Gately" Gallagher grew up with a love of art, but did not began drawing his popular comic strip "Heathcliff" until 1973. His comic became the first newspaper strip to feature a cat as the main character, beating out "Garfield" by five years. Gately's cat is so famous, in fact, that besides appearing in a TV series and over 50 print books, "Heathcliff" drawings have hung on the walls of the Louvre.

The Heathcliff comic runs in over 1,000 newspapers worldwide, and Gately's books have over a million copies in print.