(REVISED PP 8-9) I  needed to wrap up my PhD in Philosophy or else. My dissertation was on Hegel, reinterpreted in light of 18^th century agrarian political movements. My advisor told me Columbia wanted it finished no later than August. I told him I would be glad to see the back of it. For the first time in our six-year relationship, he expressed something close to wholehearted agreement.

In the meantime, the bookstore I was working at in Boerum Hill had cut back my hours, and I needed something to fill the gap.

The ad in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle was pretty straightforward:  

“WANTED: Young (20s-30s) M or F to be part-time dog for young boy. Flexible hours, overtime.” 

I made an appointment for the next day.

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(NEW PAGE 12-13) Good work requires good research. I splurge on two swipes for a visit the dog run in Washington Square Park. There are two areas for the dogs to run around. One is for big dogs, one is for small dogs. First observation: Big dogs lick less, drool more.

I think I’ll be a big dog. Maybe a Great Dane. They have certain nobility.

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(NEW PAGE 38-39 I had a meeting with my thesis advisor today. Usually these meetings don’t go so well. He dissects what I’ve written, and I find myself getting shrill and defensive. These afternoons usually end with a cursory handshake followed immediately by at least two quick tumblers of warm vodka. 

Today I just sit there and stare attentively at him. Every time he brings up an objection, I just nod and nod and agree. My eyes never leave his face. At the end of our session, I swear to God he’s scratching my head.

I think I’m onto something.

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Plus, here are the new dog portraits, courtesy Fiona Watson and the otherwise unidentified "J & B"

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 Phew. Biggest blog entry on record. That'll slow your aggregate load times.

The new panel is already laid out on the drawing table, guys. More coming soon!

A few people I've heard from have forgotten how this works, so I'd thought I'd reprise a few key points:

1) YOU HAVE AN ART CONTEST? Yup. SUBSCRIBE to the Not-So-Daily Dog newsletter and you're in it. (If you're already getting the email, you're in.) You'll get a chance to win one of three pieces of original art from the book, or even a brand-new, frame-it-and-show-your-mama original sketch from me! And if you forward the newsletter to someone else, and they sign up, you'll receive an additional entry. (They'll be entered too; fair is fair). All this just for not unsubscribing!

If you do unsubscribe, your entry to the contest will also be voided, but then again, if probably weren't interested in the art in the first place, nor in the feelings of the artist, who is, despite his size, a delicate flower. (If you want to be dropped from the email but choose to subscribe to the RSS feed, just send a email with the heading “Switching to RSS”, and your entry(ies) will be preserved.)

2) CAN I GET MY DOG IN THE BOOK? Yes, please. Email  your photos to dailydog@seltzerstudio.com, and if your dog is chosen (an entirely arbitrary process), I'll sketch your pet and feature the drawing in the book. In return, you will receive a high-level resolution file of the drawing and the author's eternal gratitude.

3) WHAT IF MY DOG'S IN THE BOOK BUT YOU HAVEN'T SENT ME A FILE? Whoops. Sorry, sorry. Just remind me. Send an email, write a note, give me a call. My memory is not a point of pride with me. But be gentle with your rebukes, please. I am, as mentioned above, a delicate flower.

4) SO GETTING MY DOG IN THE BOOK ISN'T THE CONTEST? DON'T YOU THINK IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SMARTER TO HAVE A DOG DRAWING CONTEST IN THE FIRST PLACE? Yes, it would have. But I didn't think of it. I didn't even think of having people send in dog photos for the first 10-12 entries of this megilleh.

5) WE THINK YOU SHOULD HAVE A DOG DRAWING CONTEST. Ahem. So I've heard from a few people, in great detail and at great length. So if people would prefer a contest about dog drawings, email or comment on the blog, and I'd consider rejiggering the contest. Instead of just three winners, maybe everyone who has a dog drawn in the book could win the original art. Just a thought...

I'm very fond of this week's drawing. And also this week's dog, who is named Tator Tot, and comes your way from Jennifer Smith.

That's it for now. Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.

So I'll probably have to change the title at some point. But not today, I think. I'm too savagely disappointed.

In the meantime, yes, this is the first multpanel page of Part-Time Dog. I have resisted the urge to do multipanel pages until now because I thought they might be too comic book-y. Which is not to say that I have anything against comic books. I love comic books and always have. As my wife has also pointed out, based on the number of long-boxes in my parents' attic, I had every comic book every printed. (There is one word for the house I grew up in: flammable.)

This week's dog comes by way of Bradford Keller, of Special Citizens Futures Unlimited, Inc. This organization does amazing work with autistic adults. Also Brad's an awfully nice guy, so check out the organizations site and help make his day. (His picture also contained a cat, whose image was excised for obvious reasons.)

More soon! In the meantime, please send in your dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

Thanks so much for all the inquiries. They prompted me to come back to the table and finish this thing up. For those of you who are new readers, please stop reading my ramblings here and read the book so far. The up-to-date issue is now a sticky at the top of the page, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding it. (Old readers I hope will find this an enormous improvement over jamming the book on the blog page wherever it fit.)

Especial thanks goes to Miriam Charon who never stopped writing me an whose lovely dog Hanna is this issue's featured dog. (New readers should know that if you send me in a picture of your dog, there's a good chance I'll draw it and put it in the book. You get a printable image and a chance to win a piece of original art. Details can be found in innumerable past blog entries or sign up for the newsletter and you'll find the rules in the traditional hard-to-ready type at the bottom of the page.

More soon! (The next page is already pencilled, so I mean it this time.) In the meantime, please send in your dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so faror check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

And a problem it will remain, until I come up with the month of free time needed to relink all the graphics. In the meantime, every last one of those pictures -- story and dog drawings -- can be found at full size in the book excerpt at the top of this page. Fanatics among you can still read through the archives and rediscover the "joys" of my so-called prose.

-Tom

A couple of quick pieces of info:

1) If you have a blog and you want comments, mention either Batman or Venn Diagrams. I got more emails on last week’s entry, which had, let’s face it, only the most tangential relationship to either Batman or Venn Diagrams, than I have to any other entry in months. Evidentally there is a large Venn-Diagram/Batman-obsessed audience out there, which presents a remarkably weird yet apparently under-served market opportunity. Exceptionally daring capitalists, go for it!

2) I have also gotten quite a lot of queries about my gallery show. The good folks at TAMA have decided that the recent business environment isn’t quite suitable for any openings, and who can argue with that? Thus we’ve agreed to postpone the show for now, but we’ll revisit the idea down the line.

3) Which leaves me now one PR stunt short. Here’s an idea for another one: Anyone interested in a dog drawing party? I’m a pretty fast hand with a brush, and while I can’t see getting dogs to sit still for me, I’m pretty sure a digital camera and my trusty laptop could solve that problem. All I’d need is a venue, a stool, a couple of dozen dogs, a couple of bottles of ink, a couple of bottles of bourbon, and a couple of bottles of aspirin. Anyone interested inhelping me organize this?

This week’s dog is a particularly affecting Chihuahua, courtesy Jessica Wicken of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Must run – I’m off to draw Spider-Man and Captain America battling the Pythagorean Theorem. Spidey will be wrestling a hairy hypotenuse.

More soon! In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

I never do this. If you were to somehow flip through my sketchbooks, you’d find that I always start drawing somewhere around, oh page seven, then I skip around some, then I draw a lot, I mean a LOT, of pictures of Batman. Which is why I don’t like it when people flip through my sketchbooks.

But like I said, with this book I’ve been very disciplined -- until this week, when I skipped ahead a couple of

pages. It’s not a great big discontinuity, but I’ve always carefully followed my script, which has made a point of interspersing story with pure gag, like the page above.

There’s not a great big reason for the jump. What happened is that I penciled a couple of pages in order to speed up my work, and then I decided to ink this one first, because I had a brand new bottle of ink and it looked like so much fun to do.

And I had this great dog to draw with it! For everybody who has sent it dog pictures so far, I want to explain that the way I pick which one to use is totally arbitrary. I look for a dog who looks like his or her image would complement the story. And this week I had this wonderful image of a moodily lit daschund! If you think about it, the number of people who have daschunds intersected with the number of people that think that taking moodily lit pictures of them would be a good idea intersected with the number of people who have sent me photos is a really, really small number, and also a very strange Venn diagram. So I offer especial thanks to Laura Marmo and her lovely dog Tippy.

Next week, I’ll backtrack a little to go back to the story, give some news about the gallery show, and avoid talking about Batman. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

So what, you ask, happened? A waning of enthusiasm, a bolt of remorse, a dearth of dogs?

None of the above. Basically, I got sick. Not deathly ill, just sick enough that for about a week I couldn’t do much except the bare minimum of work and the absolute maximum of sleep. Yet somehow during that week, I acquired two new clients and a half dozen new projects. Since then, I’ve been working my larger-than-average tuchus (a word that Microsoft Word, in its Gentile heart, does not recognize) off trying to make enough time to get back to this soul–satisfying-but-as-of-yet-not-mortgage-paying project. But now I am back with the whole dog posting thing.

So why just a dog and no story in this email? Well, this week’s segment contains a mildly objectionable word that may offend SPAM filters for the faint of heart, so to read it, you’ll have to click on the link down below. (I don’t really want a big buildup here; the word in question is Occidental for “tuchus.”) But it is quite a dog, isn’t it? This week’s dog is the steadfast Sam the Man, sent in by Jerry and Lenore Katz.

More soon, promise. (Really!) In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos, write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

It occurs to me that this is the first- and probably last-ever Hanukah Not-So-Daily Dog entry. For that reason, the dominant color of this page is that of a well-cooked latke. I would ask you just to go ahead and swallow that story in the spirit of the holiday, but the spirit of the holiday would actually require you to foment a violent rebellion while getting weirdly sentimental over a particularly fuel-efficient lamp. So forget the spirit of the holiday, but happy Hanukah, regardless!

This panel took me forever, probably because I’ve been busy juggling six other projects, including the new pieces for the gallery show, which, yes, I promise to post on my site as soon as I get the chance, but who has the time to do that when I can’t even, as you may have noticed, figure out how to end this God-forsaken sentence.

Having now extricated myself from that final clause, let me gratefully acknowledge this week’s dog, based on a photo sent in by the lovely Scarlett Rigby. By the way, while all of the dog’s I’ve received photos for are unquestionably the greatest, truest, most loyal dogs in all of canine history, Scarlett’s photos were really exceptional pieces of photography, and I hope that I’ve done them justice.

That’s it for now. Happy Hanukah again, and also Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday, Joyous Kwanzaa, etc.! More soon, promise. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.