This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion.
Description
The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet.
Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy)
Panel 2: I don’t know what kind of life he has lived before I adopted him seven years ago. (Drawing of three question marks)
Panel 3: But he hates motorcycles. (Drawing of a motorcycle on the road)
Panel 4: He barks at them… (Drawing of a dog barking)
Panel 5: A man possessed. (Drawing of a dog barking maniacally; speech bubble from outside the frame saying ‘Please get a grip, Frank’)
Panel 6: And the thing is, I’ll never know why. (Drawing of a dog barking at a motorcycle; speech bubble from person holding the leash saying ‘Please get a grip, Frank’)
Panel 7: But I realized that I don’t need to know why. (Drawing of a piece of paper with ‘Possible reasons: trauma, fear, hatred, annoyance, why not, he thinks they’re barking’ written on it as a bullet-point list)
Panel 8: I only need to know what he does, so that I can…
Panel 9: … get him to assume the ‘safety stance’ … so that he can rest a bit… (Drawing of a grumbling dog with his head between a standing person’s legs while a motorcycle ‘vroom vrooms’ by; speech bubble from the person saying ‘It’s okay… you chased it away. Shh, shh, shh… good boy Frank’)
Panel 10: … without feeling the need for the panicked barking… (Drawing of a dog barking ‘BORK BORK BORK BORK’)
Panel 11: … something he does less and less frequently now that he is a senior dog. (Drawing of a dog sighing, ‘hrmph’)
