Some time ago Turner Classic Movies, as part of its excellent TCM Underground series (Saturday nights at 11:00), marathoned the fascinating short films of David Lynch, all of which I viewed with glee. Lynch's short film work dates back to his early painting days in the 60's (beginning with the aptly titled Six Men Getting Sick) and prove the medium to be Lynch's ideal cinematic platform, unconstrained by mainstream film's need for storytelling and naturalism. Lynch only intermittently returned to shorts after his film career got rolling, always at the order of commissions for various projects, such as the one-minute creepfest Premonition Following An Evil Deed created for the multi-director anthology Lumière & Company. In the early 2000's Lynch created a website and realized that he could put up regular video content with no restraints from producers or the public and started making web-only shows, though none of them are still running. One of them, Rabbits, was a live-action sitcom parody featuring people (including Naomi Watts) in rabbit costumes standing around in a dimly-lit living room spouting ominous nonsense to a canned laugh track. Rabbits didn't get any play on TCM, though it was featured in Lynch's 2006 feature Inland Empire, but the other web series on DavidLynch.com did, and it proved that that day was a glorious day indeed - it was the day that DumbLand aired on TCM.
This is akin to the Criterion Collection picking up Armageddon (oh, wait...) but far more excellent. DumbLand is an 8-episode Flash cartoon that is a purposefully "crude, stupid, violent and absurd series" by Lynch's own admission and boy howdy does it not disappoint. Set in a hueless, monochrome suburban wasteland, DumbLand chronicles the lives of a brutish, wife-beater-clad man, his shell-shocked wife and their annoying, possibly naked son as they take part in such adventures as the dad (identified on the website (once upon a time) as Randy) sticking his finger in an exposed lightbulb filament, getting thrown through walls by a treadmill and spraying Raid in his face. The treadmill episode peaks when he gets a sledgehammer jammed up his butt and farts it out. Another episode concerns a man with a stick lodged perpendicularly in his mouth which Randy removes in the most damaging way possible.
This might sound like a hard sell, compounded by the fact that Lynch is usually at his worst when he's trying to be funny. Anybody who's had the misfortune of trying to watch all of Twin Peaks nowadays knows of the horrible attempts at humor in the second season, such as when the deputy with the cowlicked hair gets hit in the face with a rake and they just...keep...cutting...back...to...him...wobbling...around. A deeply pitiable number of people might recall that Lynch created another TV show with Peaks co-creator Mark Frost called On the Air that aired for a whole three episodes on Saturday nights as a mid-season replacement in '92. That clip I linked to is all that needs to be said about that. In spite of those horrific first introductions DumbLand manages to find a sweet spot between belligerent crudeness, deadpan delivery and self-aware tackiness that I find weirdly hilarious, though I certainly wouldn't take a first date to it after dinner. It certainly doesn't reward extended analysis and has a penchant for drawn-out repetition which will infuriate many a viewer. I rewatched it recently (and bid my last seven brain cells goodbye) and did a bit of research on it, and discovered that the IMDB description of the show compares it to a comic strip Lynch did that I'd never heard of before - The Angriest Dog in the World.
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Running in the L.A. Weekly from 1983 to 1994, The Angriest Dog in the World was conceived a decade earlier when Lynch briefly went to a therapist to deal with anger issues. While he eventually cured his anger through transcendental meditation (and wrote a book on the practice) he found another outlet years later with his strip about an angry dog chained up in a family's backyard in a bland suburb with a smoke-belching factory in the background. Every strip follows the same format, beginning with an introduction panel stating:
"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."
We then get four static panels of the dog on his chain, the fourth one at night. The main action is the conversations that come from the family inside the house, often philosophical non sequiturs, seizure-inducing puns or random scientific factoids of dubious veracity. The dog hears none of this, glued to his single-minded purpose.
The format broke occasionally, though always with an unsettling alternative:
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There is a clear Absurdist message in this, not just absurd but one similar to the Absurdist philosophy that Camus developed concerning the conflict between humankind's search for life's purpose and our total failure to find one. The dog is Lynch's Sisyphus, trying endlessly to achieve an impossible goal; the thoughts of the family in the house are equally futile, and the occasional consumption of the strip by fire alludes to the fleeting nature of life itself. Yet there is an unexplainable comedy to it all and I can't help but find it charming, especially the art style of the dog, more horseshoe crab than canine, and its little speech bubble. Not many people shared my sentiment when the strip was still running, though, with one angry letter calling it a "useless, idiotic CON GAME of a strip". One can't help but think about the kind of mind that regularly makes a strip so seemingly lazy, a sentiment felt by Toonpedia when it called it "the all-time easiest comic strip to draw". It's a bit stunning how long it ran, eleven years of the same five panels and non-jokes, and Joe McCullough of The Comics Journal speculated that the strip's long life could have been due to an easy way to get Lynch's name in the Weekly's table of contents. As of this writing it's never been collected but it has its fans, among them Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics, which similarly uses the exact same clip art of dinosaurs in the same order for every strip with different dialogue - and one strip revealed that TADITW was a direct influence. Of course, spare, quizzical comics have been around long before TADITW, such as the bulk of old-school New Yorker comics and the work of legendary Santa Cruzian Futzie Nutzle. However, the comic it most reminds me of is not even a full comic, but rather an untitled parasite latched onto the belly of one of the most lavish and divisive comic strips of our time.
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Maakies, created by Tony Millionaire, is a true oddity, a gorgeously drawn throwback to the golden age of newspaper comics, set in a lush fabulist universe, yet filled with aggressively dark and crude humor and ghastly characters. Unlike TADITW, which has a cool tastefulness despite its dark undercurrents, Maakies (don't worry, nobody knows how to pronounce the name) aims to offend and disgust, far surpassing the likes of Ren and Stimpy in its focus on bodily degradation, violence and the worst aspects of the human psyche - though presented with a wonky sense of humor and a great sense for surprise and the unusual. Also unlike TADITW it runs in a lot of weekly papers and international comics venues, has been nominated for a bunch of awards, was adapted into flash animated shorts for SNL and had a series based on it air on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block, albeit a terrible cartoon that was canned after two months and has never been released on video. Also, you might notice something running along the bottom of the strip:
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That little comic on the bottom edge is the most old-fashioned thing of all, called a "topper". Back in the days before WWII Sunday comics could take up a whole page of the newspaper and a common practice was to use a short second banana strip at the top or bottom of the page to fill space, often by the same author as the main strip. The practice mostly died out after the 30's but a handful of mainstream strips kept them going for decades after that - Jim Davis experimented with a topper with his strip U.S. Acres, the characters eventually showing up on Garfield and Friends. Lots of strips still fill out their Sunday installments with one-to-two-panel throwaway jokes that don't share the main strip's story. Maakies is the only current strip that consistently uses a topper and Mr. Millionaire (a title I'd love to have on my business cards someday) has never pretended that the secondary strip, which has no name of its own, could last as a solo act. While it's function is obscure the structure is always the same - purposefully bad zingers strung out by panels of nature scenes. The lame, often callous humor of the jokes is a sharp contrast to the elegantly drawn scenes, their style akin to Tintin artist Hergé's work or turn-of-the-century Japonisme art from France that mimicked the sparely expressive linework of Japanese woodblock illustration. It's a testament to Millionaire's expert technique that he gets so much out of so little, making the inclusion of his cartoon characters all the more bizarre - a contrast mined before in the excellent limited-run fantasy comic Moonshadow from the mid-'80's. That being said it's just about impossible to recommend the strip by itself to anyone, the format lacking the clear arc of TADITW and featuring much worse jokes, at least in palatability. I have to admit that I don't know if I really "get" Maakies or its topper but I at least appreciate Millionaire's great artistic talent and commitment to his vision, and if one thing comes from the topper it is revealing the true value of TADITW.
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Here's an instance where two TADITW strips were published at once, each one acting as a "topper" for the other. Neither one has precedent over the other as there is no more story in one than the other, kind of like two Maakies toppers stuck together:
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Now it all makes sense - a future for The Angriest Dog in the World - a topper for other people's comics! We'll all be rich!
OK, that's a dumb idea, but there is a way to see it as a topper, in a wobbly, lame-duck-philosophy way. There's a kind of assurance in The Angriest Dog in the World, its sameness creating a calmly unchanging reality. There's a reason that the most popular newspaper strips are the ones where the characters never age or change - the readers want that moment to last forever, a daily or weekly assurance that somewhere their favorite people are still young and funny. In this respect the children in Family Circus's immortality is its entire appeal. It's why a lot of papers, including our own Seattle Times, still publish Peanuts in reruns, ensuring that at least one part of the comics page will stay the same for the rest of the readers' lives. It's the easiest, least offensive way to keep in stasis, as comics take about 10 seconds to read and usually end in a light chuckle, just a drizzle of levity on top of a frightening cake called "life". One that someone left out in the rain. The Angriest Dog in the World is an ideal rerun topper because it never changes and is no more demanding of your time and intelligence from week to week than the last, a puff of non sequitur air, and perhaps if we can rerun it on top of all the things in life we can be reminded of a placid world where everybody knows what they want to do and think even if it gets them nowhere - ignorance is nonsensical bliss. What we need is help from website designers for a little project:
1. Collect all installments of The Angriest Dog in the World and scan them into digital image formats.
2. Create a program which will display a new one every day or week at the top of your web browser.
3. Sell, rake in cash.
This way you could see your favorite angry dog at the top of your Facebook feed, reminding you that somewhere there's a steadfast friend who doesn't have to pay attention to someone's food selfies or awful political ranting. Example:
Our long comics nightmare is over - finally, Lynch's true commercial potential has been fulfilled.
