Alex Graham went online during early lockdown for Covid-19 and began a comic series about people--depicted as animals--just coping, trying to live theAlex Graham went online during early lockdown for Covid-19 and began a comic series about people--depicted as animals--just coping, trying to live their lives. Gussy is the 49-year-old owner of a dog biscuit store; Rosie, his employee, is half his age, and they have a mutual crush; we are from the first immersed in whether this particular itch will get scratched. Hissy is Rosie's roommate, who is having some of his own (sexual identity and crush)issues. People read it, of course, as it emerged, with sometimes three posts a day, and now we have a more than 400-page novel that builds a world, makes us care for the characters and what will happen to them.
The core of the story revolves around romance(s) and how it will all work out, and the story itself takes place over several days, not months. A summary of what actually happens is not surprising; three people working in masks, anxiety pushing them, twenty-somethings (most of them) trying to live their lives in Covid time. It's just a phase in three people's lives. But I read it all through, never bored, and so I bump up my rating of 3.5 to 4 stars. I cared what would happen to these folks, I found them relatable, the pacing solid, and the artwork also solid (though some of the configurations of faces I found unnecessarily and weirdly complicated).
The reason this comic series went from popular to wildly popular is that Simon Hanselmann read it and promoted it. Hanselmann did his own Covid comic, Crisis Zone, where the crisis his characters were already in just became a little more exacerbated. Both stories involve depictions of explicit sex and prodigious drug use and identity struggles--Hissy and Megg and bisexuality, and so on. Graham adds to her Seattle story a pretty nasty story of police violence, and Gussy regularly rails on Trump and right extremism, with a couple scenes focusing on "Karens" that come through the shop, so that's different than Hanselmann, whose characters Megg and Mogg seem completely isolated from every day political reality. But Dog Biscuits otherwise seems very connected to Hanselmann's fictional universe. Some of Hanselmann's characters are far nastier, and they are funnier, but both stories have gritty realism and real empathy in them, too, for their very flawed and vulnerable characters....more