Mutts: Walking Home, comfort comic strip food for everyone, anytime

It’s a beautiful autumn day and I’m sitting outside reading Mutts and it’s awesome. One could change every word of that previous sentence, except for ‘Mutts and it’s awesome.’, to something different and it would still be true. It’s a stormy, winter’s day and I’m in bed, under the covers reading Mutts, and it’s awesome. See, it still works. Seasonal comparisons are needed in those sentences because Mutts: Coming Home features Early running on a trail with his human. The leaves on the trees are becoming bright orange to dark yellow and are just about to succumb to gravity. It’s there where they’ll be crunched by walkers, and dogs and will complete the food chain with worms using them to produce compost.

I believe that a cartoonist’s job is one of the most challenging that you’ll find. You’re asking someone to produce something that will be consumed daily. It needs to be entertaining, yet be on the same central theme or have the same characters. The mere prospect of thinking about this makes me go around the intended subject and posit the question in 360 different ways. That’s difficult enough, but as I’m observing the issue, I am on a rotating platform; unable to stop and disposed to document the humorous things that I’m thinking about or have been motivated by.

Patrick McDonnell doesn’t seem to have the same nightmare aversions to thinking about producing comic strips the way I do. Since 1996 he’s been producing eloquent, entertaining, observational, funny, and emotional comic strips about life, pets, love, and being a good human, but mainly about pets.

Presuming that your dog is an optimistic canine, ask yourself how do they see the world? What would they say to other dogs, in addition to other animals? The dogs would question why they ate catnip and swear it off forever when they see a human-sized bunny around Easter. The squirrels would get postcards from the dogs when they were on vacation. The cat would try out different expressions, other than simply purring all of the time. Each day would be a celebration of exploration, friendship, and genuine humor.

It would also have to have a heart, a raison d’etre, and a thing that drives it. However, it can’t be too heavy or presented in a manner that puts people off or makes them feel guilty. You want them to think, and possibly do something, not just to placate an echo chamber of agreement. Adopting an animal from an animal shelter is the main unspoken message of Mutts. Shelter Stories is a recurring series that the comic strip has. It features a mutt who’s in an animal shelter looking for a home. It’s a drawing, but could easily represent any dog or cat that has been or will be in an animal shelter.

Walking Home is a Mutts collection of comic strips that’s as timeless as they are poignant. They feature Mooch, Earl, the regular cast of critters, and the occasional humans that operate in their world. Some of the strips make you grin, some make you laugh, chuckle, think about a friend, muse about the wonders of the seasons or evoke a deep thought that’ll take root in the future. You’ve seen the characters before, but you haven’t seen these comic strips unless you saw them daily online or in your newspaper.

That’s the genius of McDonnel and other comic strip greats. They create a world where their characters and situations are known and expected, yet they produce new snippets and stories within them on a daily basis. Mutts: Walking Home is a joy. You’ll read it on a cloudy day with leaves falling or at the beach when it’s blazing with humidity. If this is your first Mutts collection you’ll eagerly look for McDonnell’s other works. If you’ve been a Mutt since the millennium then you’ll read Walking Home and realize that this is just as great as it ever was.

Mutts: Walking Home is by Patrick McDonnell, published by Andrews McMeel Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

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