Dog Days is a love letter to man’s oldest friend
Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s new graphic novel is a tender tribute to dogs
The newly translated Dog Days from South Korean graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim is a uniquely personal addition to the bibliography of an already major name in the contemporary comic scene.
An auto-fictional retelling, Dog Days’s protagonists Yuna—Gendry-Kim’s fictitious stand-in—and her partner are stagnating through a rough patch. They decide to adopt a puppy as their hopeful cure-all. As first-time reluctant pet owners usually do, they soon fall head over heels for their new adorable Welsh Corgi, Carrot.
Carrot becomes an especially vital presence as the couple transitions from Seoul’s stuffy urbania to Ganghwa Island—a picturesque rural area with magnificent views of the seaside. He is the first of many other canines Yuna befriends through pure serendipity while integrating—and at times, confronting—the localities of country life.
Gendry-Kim’s signature loose ink style has been a standout in her previous graphic novels. She is particularly gifted at illustrating animals and natural settings like trees and temperamental weather. Dog Days, thanks to its rural subject matter, allows the artist to show off the full range of her artistic instincts. Readers are treated to dynamic depictions of a typhoon’s chaos rendered in wild splashes of ink, followed by stunning renderings of more intricate scenes: the dripping dew from a soaked tree branch, the dark hairs on a dog’s coat, or a stubborn white ray of sunlight peeking through a bush.
Another central throughline of Gendry-Kim’s body of work is reexamining the many (often messy and contradictory) facets of South Korean history and identity. Although Dog Days addresses rural culture shock and contemporary intergenerational tensions, particularly on the subject of domestic animals, the book at its core is a heartfelt ode to the author’s own beloved dogs. The canines greatly supersede their human counterparts as Dog Days’s main characters. We seldom see representations of Yuna or her partner, and are instead spoiled with scenes upon scenes of the dogs and of detailed documentations of their lives and relationships.
This hyperfocus invites readers to observe these canine characters through the author’s unashamedly biased perspective, creating an intimate reading experience. One can only imagine the countless—and no doubt joyful—hours where Gendry-Kim surely sat right by her muses, observing their antics and meticulously sketching their likeness over and over again, perhaps hoping to capture something of their vivacity so that a part of them can live forever within the pages of her book.
