Australian Comic Gallery: Dogs

Dogs started out as a social comment book that would deal with issues of animal rights. This came largely from reading the book Animal Liberation and gaining knowledge of some of the vicious and cruel experiments humans have perpetrated against the animal kingdom, often seemingly without rhyme or reason. As the project developed, however, I wanted to bring in elements of fun and whimsy as well, to find a middle ground between humour and horror, and settled on a story about two dogs, from a city of talking dogs, who find themselves thrown into our world, a world where animals are dumb and persecuted by humans. The dogs, Wednesday and Pepper, are basically based on my own dogs of the same names. Originally artist Marshall Browne (the illustrator of Eschaton #3) was going to fully illustrate the title, but as the work progressed it became apparent that Marshall was keen to illustrate scenes, but not in a traditional comic book format, a format which I felt the story needed. Thus is was decided to have two features in each issue, a back up feature illustrated by Marshall Browne, and the ongoing story of Wednesday and Pepper, the talking dogs, by artist Brian Jordan. Having worked with Brian on Tales of Stranggore it was good to collaborate again on a different project.

-- Darran Jordan

Australian Comics