David Lynch has died, aged 78. Speaking personally as a fan of many years, it's hard to know what to say about that less than a day after the news broke. The Twin Peaks co-creator, filmmaker, Quinoa cook, and cultural icon was my favorite creator in any medium, and the world immediately feels a lot grayer without him.
Lynch was the consummate multi-hyphenate. Aside from his films and television, he was also a visual artist, a musician, an advocate for Transcendental Meditation, and a designer of some very odd furniture. He was also, for longer than you probably realize, a cartoonist. His comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World was published weekly in the now defunct Los Angeles newspaper, the LA Reader, between 1983 and 1992. Despite that impressive nine-year run, precious little of the material is publicly available today.
Each chapter of The Angriest Dog in the World follows the exact same structure: In the first panel, a caption reads: "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." In panels two, three, and four we see the same image of a black dog (though honestly the thing looks more like a shark or crocodile), immobile, softly growling. In the fifth panel the sky is blacked out with night.
While the images are identical throughout, the words change each episode (Having drawn the original strip Lynch would reportedly call the LA Reader office each week and dictate the dialogue to the no doubt perplexed art director David Hwang). The unseen family inside the house (four individuals named Bill, Sylvia, Pete, and Billy, Jr.) are talking, sometimes in conversation, sometimes just to themselves. They monologue, tell jokes, or simply make cryptic non-sequiturs.
Lynch came up with the idea for the cartoon in the early '70s, a time that he later admitted to Rolling Stone magazine filled him with "tremendous anger," something which he says evaporated when he discovered Transcendental Meditation. "I made life kind of miserable for people around me at certain times… So, anger – the memory of the anger – is what does the Angriest Dog. Not the actual anger, anymore. It's sort of a bitter attitude toward life. I don't know where my anger came from, and I don't know where it went."
As this is a Lynch project, you're understandably left with questions of your own when reading The Angriest Dog. Who are these people? Why is this dog in such a frenzy? What are his owners even talking about, if anything at all? There are, of course, no definitive answers here.
Despite this, the comic plays a strange sort of magic trick on the brain. The meaning behind the dog's boiling rage somehow feels like it changes with each new chapter, despite being the exact same string of panels every single week. The timing of the dialogue is precise and is often what lands the punchline to the jokes. (One of my favorite examples of this is a strip where the sole speech bubble is on the night time panel. "It doesn't get any better than this!" someone says, as the dog practically explodes with incandescent fury.) It's stilted and strange, in some ways recalling the consciously un-naturalistic performances that Lynch would often encourage from his actors.
Alas, The Angriest Dog in the World is out of print and examples of it are hard to find online. Some of the LA Reader strips were reprinted in Dark Horse Comics' defunct monthly anthology Cheval Noir (two instalments an issue from July 1991's #20 to January 1993's #38). A first – and so far only – official collection followed in 2020 from Rotland Press, but was limited to 500 copies and only contained 17 strips, and while new chapters were published for a time on DavidLynch.com, that site simply redirects to the late director's YouTube channel now.
Still, there has been a steady micro-industry of quality Lynch-related books published over the last few years. While it could be considered marginalia compared to his great works – Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, his paintings and music – there is certainly an audience for this strange, surprisingly enduring creation. Perhaps, if someone ever gains access to the full archive and is able to make it public, The Angriest Dog in the World will finally have its day.
Many stars have paid heartfelt tributes to David Lynch.
