Webcomic Wednesday: Coyote Doggirl by Lisa Hanawalt

My favorite narratives of pursuit are purposeless. We don’t know why the pursuer is chasing the pursued, we just know the fact of it, and we’re counted on to create the story and the stakes ourselves. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”: This is the best sentence Stephen King ever wrote, despite its status as the lede to the most bloated and self-indulgent project of his career, because it’s a perfect black diamond of story, a Goldilocks quantity of information. The who and the where and the what are sufficient. The when and the why is irrelevant. 

Lisa Hanawalt’s Coyote Doggirl, currently being serialized weekly on her tumblr, embraces this approach not out of King’s (uncharacteristic, to say the effing least) desire for economy, but out of her own very characteristic desire for absurdity. Hanawalt loves drawing horses and dogs, anthropomorphized and otherwise; loves drawing oddly and incongruously specific items of clothing; loves exploring the at-times grotesque intimacy of the relationship between human and animal; loves watercolors; loves evoking a sensation of suppressed but still detectable terror and discomfort under the surface. In creating a purposeless pursuit, in having her titular character announce with hilarious unspecificity “We are being pursued by guys” and then take off on horseback across the wilderness, she’s created a skeleton on which her interests can be draped like muscle and skin and a soft pelt of fur. There’s a touch of the weird-West to it, maybe via Sammy Harkham’s Black Death (there’s some very similar imagery in there), but it’s not really a genre exercise, it’s the use of a genre to exercise something personal, something innate.

(via bowielovesbeyonce)