Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Last Word on Minimalism

The talented Mr. Guerrieri, of Soho the Dog, not only composes, critiques, makes sausage, and blogs, but is also a comic strip artist.

I don't do comics myself but I do have a favorite, David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World, which ran for from '83 to '92 in the LA Reader, and is now considered a pioneering work in the genre of constrained comics. It always consisted of a fixed introductory text ("The dog who is so angry he cannot move. He cannot eat. He cannot sleep. He can just barely growl. Bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis.") and four images changing in only the smallest of details, the last after nightfall, of the growling dog, chained outside a house. But the text in the balloons emerging from the house changed each week. My favorite went something like this: "'Darling, do you like minimal art?' 'I married you, didn't I?'"

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.davidlynch.de/angry.html

David Ocker said...

I'm glad someone liked it.

And, I confess that just now was the first time I ever realized that cartoon was done by the same David Lynch who was the famous incomprehensible movie guy.


They don't call me Mr. Oblivious for nothing.

Adam Baratz said...

It's all about Dinosaur Comics.