Dogtangle - Max Huffman

Dogtangle by Max Huffman / 136-page hardback, 5.8 x 7.3 inches, published in 2025 by Fantagraphics / ISBN 9798875001291

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A satirical comedy about an ambitious power couple in a bleak corporate landscape who defy God and nature to create a modern Cerberus for their time.

Dogtangle opens with a town hall meeting in a Taco Bell nestled in the bland corporate environment of Business Park. A man, bleating to anyone who will listen about the evils of current zoning laws, meets a woman who works in pharmaceutical marketing. They begin a relationship. They get married. From their union springs the idea of the Hypermutt: a many-headed mass of dogs that absorbs each new dog it encounters.

This debut graphic novel from Chicago cartoonist Max Huffman, about an awful power couple who defy God and nature in creating a hound of hell for our times, is at turns a rich satirical fable, a white-collar black comedy, and a stylistic tour de force blending elements of abstraction, cubism, mid-century modernism, and visual sight gags. One of the most visually distinctive and funny graphic novels in recent memory, Dogtangle is also underpinned with a deep mistrust of corporate and cultural hegemony, cementing its relevance in our increasingly oligarchal times.

"So far as I know, there are not a lot of Vorticist comics out there. Max’s comics operate in some/several folded dimensions that are not totally forthcoming but must be captured and deciphered. The stories are zingy, go around impossible corners and I think Wyndham Lewis might have written a blurb for them as well."― Gary Panter