" The Angriest Dog in the World strip came about when I was working on Eraserhead.
I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it
and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was so angry.
And
then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving- three panels
were set in the day anyone was at night. So there's passage of time, but
the dog never moves. And it struck me that it's the environment that's
causing this anger- it's what's going on in the environment. He hears
things coming from the house. Or something happens on the other side of
the fence, or some kind of eather condition.
It
finally boiled down more to what he hears from inside the house. And
that seemed like an interesting concept. That it would just be balloons
of dialogue from within the house with a dog outside. And what was said
in the balloons might conjure a laugh.
The
L.A Weekly wanted to publish it. So they published it for many years.
After a couple of years, it was in the Baltimore Sun as well. Every
Monday I had to come up with what to say. Then I would phone it in. I
wouldn't always do the lettering and sometimes I didn't like the way the
lettering looked, so toward the end I did some of the lettering again.
The
editor who had taken on the cartoon went off to other paper partway
through the run, and I had different editors. Toward the end of the nine
years, the same editor who had taken it on came back to the paper. And
he asked me not to do it anymore. It had run its course. "
David Lynch , Catching the Big Fish .
