Its always the cute, harmless ones that you need to watch out for. Sometimes they just want to be bigger than they are, like in today’s comic, and sometimes they have darker purposes. 

Take today’s Webcomic O’ the Week, Pencil Pup. Pencil Pup is the story of a girl who wakes up to find herself in a pencil-and-paper world, with her only companion being a pencil-legged puppy. This puppy, the titular Pencil Pup, seems quite insistent that the girl should stay in this graphite geography forever, and this is where the adorable creepy starts settling in. The more the girl tries to leave, the more the puppy implies (through well-timed silences and meaningful looks) that bad things will happen to the person who abandons Pencil Pup. 

The comic is fantastic. The more I read of it, the more I want to read. Megan Brennan, Pencil Pup’s creator, creates a world that would be so easy to do lazily (its pencil. on paper.), but her commitment to thinking about how the world works and what the two main characters’ roles makes the work shine. The landscape is both infinite and immediate, and composed of sheets of paper that can become pretty much anything the main character can draw. The tired phrase “the medium is the message” gets turned on its head: The medium is the world. Also, there’s quite a heaping helping of Doge in the strip (although its potentially pre-Doge in its origins) which picks at my funny bone. 

Thanks,

Philip