It was the Wild West. Unlike comic books, or even traditional newspapers, for the most part you didn’t buy an alt-weekly newspaper, much less hold on to it. You picked them up from a pile somewhere, read them or didn’t, and then threw them out. And just how many were there? In the years before the Internet how was it even possible to have any idea who was publishing where, especially with papers starting and folding, merging with others, changing names and moving? The industry’s own national trade association kept poor membership records and was (and still is) very selective about who it admits into its ranks. And what counts as an alt-weekly anyway? Some of these papers ran comic strips, but many didn’t. Some of these papers just ran comic strips without letting the artists know and didn’t pay them.
Writer Richard Gehr reveals the secret behind David Lynch’s Comic Strip. (Photo by Joe Rouse, Society of Illustrators)
At the opening night of Society of Illustrators current Alt Weekly Comics show, cartoonist Mark Newgarden and I descended the stairs to the lower level of the show and stopped to look at a framed page of a newspaper that contained a strip from film director David Lynch’s nearly forgotten entry in the genre, The Angriest Dog in the World.
“Huh, that one,” I said. “I always wondered if he actually had anything to do with the week to week production of that. It was the same thing every time.” “Someone here will know the answer,” Newgarden replied as we finished down the stairs. Turns out he was right. A few minutes later, the writer Richard Gehr (Spin, Rolling Stone, Village Voice, etc.) walked over and explained how the strip was produced.
Gehr: “I used to be an editor at the Los Angeles Reader, from like 1980 to ’84, and at some point David Lynch called up the editor at the time, James Vowell, and said, ‘Hi, I like to do a comic strip for you,’ and James wisely said, ‘OK.’ And David Lynch said, ‘Well, it’s kind of a weird concept. There’s only like one…part.’ And James said, ‘Well, OK, let’s see how it goes.’ And so the deal was that every week, David Lynch would phone us up and me, or somebody else, but usually me, would take dictation from him. He’d say, ‘Panel one: Blah, blah, blah…Panel two…’ And we would give it to somebody in the production department and they would White Out the panels from the week before and write in a new, quote/unquote…gag.” The strip, which ran from 1983 to 1992, appeared in just a handful of publications which, besides the Reader, included Atlanta´s Creative Loafing, New York Press and Denver’s Westword. The art for the strip consisted of the same three panel of a chained dog barking, angrily, in a back yard with black air billowing from smoke stacks in the background. The final panel, again, always the same, pictured the same scene, except at night. Dialogue appeared from the window of a house adjacent to the dog. So, the strip, which ran for nearly a decade, had exactly two pieces of original art, which Gehr believes were actually produced by Lynch himself.
“I assume he drew the first iteration,” says Gehr. “I don’t even know if the second and third [panels] were hand drawn. Those could have been mimeographed too or something.“
Lynch has said that he came up with the idea for “The Angriest Dog” around 1973, when he was developing ideas for the movie Eraserhead. “I don’t know why I chose a dog,” Lynch told Spin magazine in 1990. “It has more to do with people and that the idea that anger is so intense…I just drew the tree and the dog. I got the idea that nothing would change pictorially. I like the idea that nothing would change.” The strip was weird, kooky, interesting and unique. Was it any good? At the time of its run, some people liked the strip and others hated it. According to a LA Reader survey taken during the strip’s run, 40 percent of its readers regularly read the strip, and 17 percent rated it as their favorite feature. A New York Press survey in the late 80s found that for 20 percent of its readers, the strip was their least favorite part of the paper.
“I always loved the idea of The Angriest Dog in the World though never the strip itself,” says Newgarden. “Learning that Lynch (literally) phoned it in makes me love it just a little bit more now, all these years later.”
So, mystery solved? Perhaps. But according to this clip from The Incredibly Strange Film Show program from 1990, in the later years of the strip, Lynch, or one of his assistants, slipped an envelope containing dialogue for the strip–complete with pre-cut word balloons–under the door of the LA Reader’s offices each week. Reader Editor James Vowell can be seen placing the balloon onto the pre-press strip for completion. So, who knows?
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You can purchase Richard Gehr’s latest book, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists, here.
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