Sophie: Jurassic Bark

Gr 2-5–The newspaper comic strip seems a nostalgic notion in the current cartooning moment, which boasts graphic novels for every interest, age, and offers an exhaustive array of styles. This work—an expansion of Anderson’s dog-focused webcomic Dog Eat Doug—harkens back to those heady days of Calvin and Hobbes and Baby Blues with an imaginative yet relatable tone and punchline-based comic pacing. Encapsulated, episodic stories of a pup called Sophie learning to live with her family’s new bald-pated baby, Doug, come in six-panel chunks of storyline interspersed with flights of fancy wherein the dog imagines herself, baby in tow, as a towering tyrannosaurus, a canine cowpoke, or as a domestic defender against time-traveling cats. Whether it’s getting into skirmishes with the neighborhood squirrels or gobbling up food the baby has dumped on the floor, Sophie’s adventures are a lovely enticement to see things from a dog’s-eye view, albeit a particularly reflective and philosophical one. Furthermore, Anderson’s imaginative imagery finds absurd, energetic glee in simultaneously magnifying and making more adorable familiar fears, like backyard spiders and monsters under the bed. The visuals have a nostalgic touch as well; Sophie’s pupil-less, white eyes recall centenarian hound Sandy in the “Little Orphan Annie” comics.