PX97: Open Me… I’m A Dog!

Open Me… I’m A Dog! by Art Spiegelman (234x185mm)

After Maus, everybody waited for Spiegelman’s next hefty masterwork…

… so Spiegelman made a book for young children instead.

It’s neat — it’s a very cute size, and it’s got an pop-up feature, but it’s not a pop-up book, really.

Instead it tells a good yarn about this dog that’s been shaped into a book. It’s refreshingly straightforward.

And it’s tactile — both the end papers and this figure are somewhat felt-like.

It’s got a leash!

I can totally see kids loving this book and wanting to read it over and over.

Gary Groth interviews Spiegelman in The Comics Journal #181, page 132:

GROTH: You ‘re also writing a children’s book right now.
SPIEGELMAN: Yeah, it’s written. I’m just waiting for my
agent to finalize the contract before I start the finished
paintings. It’s based on an idea I had when I was 20, and
taking too many psychedelics for my own good. This
seemed like it was a good time to do it. I tried it out on
Dashiell, my 3 1/2 year old kid, and he seemed to get it.
GROTH: This is a book you ‘re going to illustrate as well as
SPIEGELMAN: It’ s a picture book. The total number of words
is probably under 500 easily. It’s an existential kid book:
Pat the Bunny meets Foucault. [laughter]
GROTH: That sounds charming! Do you consider this part
of a holding pattern?
SPIEGELMAN: Ouch. In a way. It’s hard to figure out what
long comix work I’ m capable of doing right now, so, short
of driving myself crazy while feeling blocked there, I
figure that Open Me. I’m A Dog has its pleasures. I have
can be O.K. even if it doesn’t feed my largest ambitions.
I will also be taking on a book project called Comics
101. That’ll be an adaptation of the comics lectures that I
used to give at the School of Visual Arts — my idiosyn-
cratic, historical and aesthetic overview of comics, and
to accept that making something finitein scale and scope putting that into some kind of hard-copy form after all
these years. It seems to me that ifl’m going to continue in
this kind of self-lacerating mode, it’s another holding
pattern. It’s something that’s mine to do, something I’ve
given a lot of thought to over the years. It will probably be
essays on about 14 or 15 cartoonists.

People like it:

The best part is when the honest to Abe dog is triumphantly proclaiming his true self on his hind legs. He looks so happy. I wish he didn’t have to beg, though, or state his case compared to real live dogs. The sweet part is when he knows it. That’s the charm of the book. I’d want him around.

See?

I can’t wait to adopt this dog for my shelf!

Some people think it’s a bit much:

It’s a winning conceit, with ingenuous tongue-in-cheek illustrations, though, like Lane Smith’s Happy Hocky Family (1993), some will find that much of the humor is pitched over the heads of its target audience.

I think I read somewhere that it was a commercial success, but I can’t find it now…

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

PX00: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District by Ben Katchor (280x225mm)

Like most Pantheon books, this is a handsome object. There’s nothing extraneous here — no introductions by famous authors or anything icky like that.

As much as I love Katchor, there’s precious little development between the previous collection of Julius Knipl strips and this one: It’s still a hypnotic pile-up of weird fancies, page after page.

Katchor’s main technique in these strips is using the captions as continuous narration, while the things that happen in the panels (and the things they say) go in and out of sync with that narration. It’s a storytelling tick that demands that the reader really pay attention: A momentary lapse of attention results in the reader having to re-read the strip to get what happened.

Hey! I’d like to have a bus like that.

As with previous Katchor collections, it took me all day to read this 100 page book. It’s just so… slippery. I mean, I totally adore it, but it’s exhausting to read. I have to take frequent pauses.

The collection ends with a twenty page story. Well, a sort-of story — there’s a lot of characters and stuff going on, and the narrative wafts and weaves in strange ways.

It was nominated for two Eisner awards.

Uhm:

This more contemporary setting for the dreamlike metropolis also features more a lot more women than previously seen in Katchor’s work, but as they’re all wives or girlfriends there’s still no chance of any Bechdellian exchanges.

Indeed:

And therein may lie these comics’ genius: In shading his absurdly imagined present with a fondly recalled past, Katchor gives his eccentric Gotham an unexpected substance, a taste of humanity that lingers long after that last panel and makes the Beauty Supply District a place to visit again and again.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.