“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”*…
It was hiding in plain sight, and yet it was almost designed not to be noticed at all. For several years from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, an experimental four-panel comic strip conceived and written by David Lynch ran in a handful of alt-weeklies under the title “The Angriest Dog in the World.” If you were the type of person who might have been flipping through the Los Angeles Reader or the New York Press or Creative Loafing or the Baltimore City Paper around 1987, you surely remember the peculiarly unfunny strip with the never-changing image of a tiny, spermatozoa-esque pooch straining at his lead in which the deadpan resolution was almost always a transitional nighttime image of the same godforsaken yard.
It is said that Lynch came up with the idea for the strip during the long gestation period for Eraserhead in the early to mid-1970s, but it was only after the prominent releases of The Elephant Man and Dune that Lynch was able to convince anyone to run the strip. James Vowell, founding editor of the L.A. Reader, was the first publisher to bite. Vowell told SPIN in 1990 that Lynch drew the template for the strip a single time and sent it on, and after that it was the task of David Hwang, the alt-weekly’s art director, to receive the dialogue for each new installment from Lynch himself or Lynch’s assistant Debbie Trutnik, and draw the new dialogue on a piece of wax paper that was then superimposed over the strip’s template…
More of the story– and more (and larger) examples of the strip– at “David Lynch’s memorably pointless comic strip “The Angriest Dog in the World.”
* Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
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As we reconsider the ridiculous, we might send malleable birthday greetings to Randolph “Ralph” Dibny; he was born on this date. Better known as “Elongated Man,” Dibney is a superhero in the D.C. Universe, a member of three incarnations of The Justice League. A former police detective of the Central City Police Department, he gained his powers due to exposure to dark matter from the Speed Force.
Dibny was one of the earliest Silver Age DC heroes to reveal his secret identity to the public, and also one of the first to marry his love interest, Sue. After teaming up with several other superheroes including Batman, Green Lantern, the Atom, Zatanna and the Justice League of America, he became a member of the team; eventually, his wife became a member as well. The couple was notable for having a stable, happy, and relatively trouble-free marriage—an anomaly in the soap-operatic annals of super hero comic books.
