When he was working on the film Eraserhead, filmmaker David Lynch drew a small dog—“and it looked angry,” as he has written. “And I started looking at it, and I wondered why it was angry.”
The result: the four-panel comic strip The Angriest Dog in the World, which the Los Angeles Reader published from 1983 to 1992.
Now, the Detroit-based Rotland Press is bringing it back—but in a super limited edition of 500 copies, ensuring it will remain a rare cult treat.
The strip is appropriately Lynchian: The panels never change, but the text—from unseen characters around the dog—does.
The original strip was created with Lynch, on location shooting films, dictating the dialogue to his editor over the phone. The strips were thus lettered by different hands, so for this edition publisher Ryan Standfest utilized a typeface based on Lynch’s handwriting.
The resulting package is the first to print the comic at the same scale it originally appeared, the first reprinting of 17 strips from the first run—and the first reprinting approved by Lynch himself.
The book publishes on Sept. 18. For more, visit Rotland Press.
