From Publishers Weekly
Swedish cartoonists Anderson and Sjunnesson straddle the line between reality and surreality with this tale of their trip to an alternative comics convention in the Balkans. The journey leads to one strange occurrence after another, starting with a pelting by ice cream grenades. From there the corpse of Josip Tito (stored in a freezer), a super-soldier program and the eponymous canine creatures all figure in a story that trades in strange and loaded images to express life during constant conflict. The story is supposedly based on some true events, but it's all told through a dreamy haze. The cartoonists combine their art styles to create cloudy black and white images, continuing the feeling that these events are happening inside the mind as much as in reality. An interlude drawn in a much simpler style attempts to explain the story, but as far as this book is concerned, processing the world through imagination is far richer and more interesting. Anderson and Sjunnesson manage to keep the odd story going with their tight and fluid plotting, which says that in Bosnia the absurd is what is real. (Nov.)
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*Starred Review* The title refers not to a Sarajevo apartment-dweller's pet but to the new breed that has evolved there in response to the dangers of being run over, crushed by falling debris, and otherwise vertically reduced. They're not necessarily dead, and one may rue making any such assumption. On the other hand, they're far from the most dangerous or outrageous phenomenon Andersson and Sjunnesson encounter in their search for a Bosnian friend at the time of the NATO bombing of Serbia. Instead, that would perhaps be the veiled Srebrenica women, or the zombies who were abducted American soldiers, or whoever's really running the underground ice-cream plant in Pale. It almost certainly isn't the corpse, missing one leg, of Tito, which pops up with alarming frequency. Although this mind-boggling black-comic mini-odyssey is about, rather than by, Balkan artists (Andersson and Sjunnesson are Swedes with considerable Balkan experience), it is of a piece with, though tonally poised between, the chilling novels of Albanian Ismail Kadare and the confounding stories of Serbian Zoran _ivkovi?. Collaboratively drawn in a blocky, woodcuttish style full of brutal, pop-eyed figures, it looks exactly right for the fun house-morgue aura of the story. Ray Olson
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About the Author
Max Andersson and Lars Sjunneson live in Sweden.
