Dog Park

Details

Written and drawn in collaboration with Radha O’Meara, based on her life experiences.

Comic book. First edition. Perfect bound. 84 pages. ISBN9780645080179

B5 size, 4 colour risograph printed by the lovely folks at Glom Press.

Printed with the generous assistance of a publishing grant from the Culture of Communication at the University of Melbourne.

$10 from each copy will be donated directly to Pay the Rent.

Blurb

SHE is half-asleep when she dresses to walk her dogs to the local park in the dim morning sunlight. Wandering together through the cold, damp grass, they stumble upon something dreadful. This experience rocks the woman out of her habitual actions and everyday rhythms. Dog Park draws us into an unsettling contemploation of the murky lines between the living and the dead.

What are people saying?

‘Dog Park traces and retraces the disquieting oscillation of thresholds. Between the beloved and the abject, the tender and the spectacle, the natural and unnatural. Looking for dignity, love and meaning in the relentless pull of entropy and unravelling.’

—Sarah Firth, award-winning cartoonist and graphic recorder

‘That a short, quiet book about interspecies love and grief can so completely take over you is news to me. News to you? I smelled it, heard it, walked it, felt it, all of it – it got under my skin, that’s what happened. Read this wonder of a book.’

—Maria Tumarkin, Windham Campbell-winning author of AXIOMATIC

‘Dog Park is a dark and poignant meditation on death and dying, drawn through lines and rhythms that move and hum with life.’

—Rachel Ang, award-winning author of SWIMSUIT

‘Opening with the story of a discovery during a morning dog-walk, 'Dog Park' traverses into meditative territories on death, abjection, flesh, and the forms we all might take, animate or inanimate. Grills's lush colours and inky richly smudged lines create an aesthetic that is touchable and oozing, complementing the visceral quality of the work, and making the figures in the comic – human and non-human animals – sensory and thing-like. Images are accompanied by a resonant soundtrack of hushed creaks, squishes, jingles, rustles, and crunches. This is an unsettling, immersive and beautiful work that invites immediate re-reading.’

—Liz McFarlane, senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Melbourne University and Co-founder of the Comics Arts Workshop