by Mike Meginnis
There is a line in art between communicating misery and wallowing in it. A Dog and His Elephant tiptoes that line constantly, teetering between the baroque horror of a life gone wrong and the simple, dehumanizing facts of lower class existence, until finally it explodes, implodes, and makes us forget the line, makes us forget there ever was one, makes us wish we knew where it was anymore. A Dog and His Elephant is very tough reading, but it is great reading, it is reading deserving of your time and serious consideration. Like many of the great works of art in this world, webcomic, prose, film or otherwise, it is great in large part because it tests our assumptions and beliefs by showing us things that we do not want to see, and making us confront them.
Persoff is best known for his free webcomic Teddy, a reading experience so amazingly uncomfortable as to draw comparison to Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. In fact, if you can imagine this, Teddy hurts more. His meticulous deconstruction of the titular character of these works is made bearable only by his immaculate craft. Again, as with Ware's work, if the art was bad the strip would be contemptible and unreadable. Unlike Ware's comics, Teddy defies description. Sure, you could try to describe any one strip, but there wouldn't really be any point. All that is important for the purpose of this article is that it is twisted, it is heavy handed in a sense but all too subtle for comfort when it comes to anything emotionally cathartic, and it has a design sense that, if you can believe it, actually trounces the hell out of Ware's. And that was the last time this article will mention that particular artist, I swear.
He also makes fascinating if not completely satisfying experimental music blending distorted classic tunes with presumably original instrumentation, or at least original arrangements (read: mutilations), with glitchy, uneven, engaging results. But that's neither here nor there. (What is it, you may ask, if it's not one of those? Why, it's interesting, that's what.)
The essential, reductive narrative of A Dog and His Elephant is one fast on its way to becoming a cliché. An ugly, inconsiderate abusive man in a tight white shirt and tight black jeans beats, humiliates and terrorizes a stressed out, neurotic, slightly more attractive woman with what one must assume is a beautiful soul inside her. What separates this work from the pack is the way its chaotic narrative is oppressed and shaped by its setting, a single room apartment whose toilet is separated from its bed by ten feet of carpet and a cheap wooden door. A single vase with three haggard flowers sits on a small card table next to the phone. They look weighed down, but they are the kindest inhabitants of this room. A turntable sits against the wall to our left, next to a small pile of records and below a poster of a jazz musician playing his trumpet. In the foreground, there are shelves on which various and sundry books, cassettes, and toys are piled. In this work, the "camera" never moves, the setting does not change, and the environment shifts in its composition about as often as a real house does: which is to say, only when a character actively exerts force to make it do so.
To call this environment oppressive is to sell it short. It is smothering. It is poisonous. It is hateful. As with the relationship between the dog and the elephant, the only way to make a meaningful change in this world is violence, and all that this accomplishes is the creation of wreckage, shrapnel, junk on the carpet.
The fundamental rules of this lifestyle are illustrated brilliantly and heartbreakingly in the opening sequence of the story. The elephant bursts through the door of the apartment, panicking. "FUCK!" she screams. "OH FUCK!" She's twitching, she's clutching at her face. Her husband bursts through the door and the abuse begins. In the ensuing struggle, their television is knocked over, the wire ripped from it, its casing shattered. It smokes and pops and fizzles while he berates and accuses her, and perhaps the accusations are unfounded, perhaps they aren't. It's hard to care while he's loading that gun. She sneaks up on him with a bat, changing our whole image of her as a person, and knocks him out with it as he cocks the rifle. He collapses and the shattered TV set stops smoking, stops making a sound. He curses her one final time and then passes out. Brief peace persists, our nerves begin to calm, and suddenly there is an ear-shattering "POP!!!" from the TV. It has burned the carpet. It has scared the shit out of our elephant. She hides his rifle behind the bed and sleeps holding her bat; husband sprawled across the floor like a dead body.
The next morning, after he leaves, she gets up out of the bed, picks up and moves the garbage, and leaves the apartment. The shattered electric device sits on the coffee table in the fore, cord wrapped around it like embalming cloth. Here is one of the most unsettling, even terrifying moment-- we believe, foolishly, as she opens the door and departs, that we will be allowed to follow her. We can't leave the apartment, this relationship, and there is no escape for us. These characters may go other places where they are presumably other people, not screaming and shooting and bludgeoning, but shopping, working, smiling politely and perhaps even enjoying themselves. We aren't allowed to see that, though its existence is suggested. What we may see is the shattered idiot box, the hidden gun, the baseball bat still lying in their marriage bed.
After a couple of hours alone with the apartment, we are rejoined by the elephant. She's bought a broom. Hysterically, tragically, she sweeps the plastic and glass fragments on the carpet into a smaller, tighter pile than they were in before, moving each only fractions of an inch, and then leaves them there, setting the broom in the corner where the rifle used to be. This sequence is brilliant. Read it as you will, but to me it said this: Nothing leaves this place, and anything we bring in with us is impotent to save us. Even you can't leave, and you especially can't save us.
But maybe that's just me.
The art is rendered in shades of gray with an attention to detail that rivals, perhaps even beats out, Dave Gibbons' work in Watchmen. It's an unfair comparison, of course-- Gibbons' work was penciled, inked, and colored, and he had to draw each panel fresh, whereas every panel in A Dog and His Elephant is mostly recycled. Still, the fact that the comparison even comes to mind is something Persoff should be truly proud of.
Drawn in flawless vector graphics, the apartment is extremely detailed and immediately convincing. It grounds the ugly, surreal anthropomorphic characters that inhabit it, downplaying their grotesquery for a sort of mundane, ground-down ugliness with an underlying knowledge that real world rules do not apply to these people, no matter how miserable and realistic they may seem. After all, one of Frank's best friends has a beak.
The lighting Persoff applies to A Dog and His Elephant is perhaps its most subtle element, which is part of what makes it so impressive. Readers will hardly notice the way he lights the apartment, from a ceiling lamp to the moon in the window, reflected on a wall. Heat wafts from an old radiator and the refrigerator quietly hums when left open. Old records pop, fizzle and crack under gentle, late afternoon light. Like the great black and white films of yore, there is a matter of fact other-worldliness to the setting, the knowledge that this is just like any one room apartment tinged with strangeness by the mathematical precision of its carefully composed shades of gray representing color.
What makes it all come together, though, is something remarkably simple: the presentation of the comic. Displayed in its own fitted pop-up window, one panel shows at a time, large enough to contain all the information the apartment's nature requires. When given enough time, your browser will pre-load the next panel, making a nearly seamless reading experience for broadband users. This, while it may irritate purists, actually makes reading much less monotonous than it would be if the panels were arranged in a traditional strip pattern. Again, an excellent decision from a brilliant designer. His storytelling, however, still could use some fine tuning.
The plot, if one can call the brief and wild string of events portrayed in A Dog and His Elephant as such, moves at an erratic pace, with one very heavy-handed sequence that recalls Persoff's success with his webcomic Teddy, but doesn't recapture it. The narrative fractures somewhat incurably at this point, but this was probably intentional-- it begins the descent into madness that is ultimately the story's climax. It's a useful device, but in the immediate sense it undermines the comic's carefully constructed appearance of craftless, accidental storytelling, and for this I would have to dock points if we used them here.
In the climactic sequence, the characters seem almost incidental, literally tucked away in the corner for much of the duration. Nature itself becomes central, and what I had always suspected is confirmed: there is no elegant solution to an all-smothering, strangling, self-masticating relationship like this one. No amount of plotting can disentangle these two. They may only be crushed, swept aside, and forgotten. With the most climactic anti-climax you'll see in ten years of webcomics (at the least), A Dog and His Elephant makes a challenging, perplexing, lasting, and ultimately triumphant impression on readers. If there are easy answers in this world, it would seem that Ethan Persoff hasn't got the slightest interest in helping you find them. But he sure seems to like making me wonder if the questions are even worth asking.
