Mutts: Hot Dogs, Hot Cats is a classic comic in a new wrapper

Mutts by Patrick McDonnell is that friend who you might not have seen in years. The two of you had excellent conversations. They were your ying to your yang. You really like chocolate and they really like peanut butter and it was never a problem if the two accidentally rubbed against one another. It’s the Snoopy to your Woodstock. Mutt, Hot Dogs, Hot Cats is a collected works of this classic comic strip that have been released in book form that’s as fabulous the first of fourteenth time that you read it.

It doesn’t matter when the book was released because this comic strip is timeless. However, for the record Hot Dogs, Hot Cats was released on. What we initially found amazing about the book is that the strips presented in the book are sequential and all of them hit their target. The book starts with New Year’s Day, goes through the four seasons, as well as major holidays and ends the night of New Year’s Eve.

Some of the strips are in their classic Sunday color while others occupy the remaining six days of the week. It’s fascinating to see a year play out in comic strip form. Some of the strips aim for the funny bone while others are more observational in nature. Those strips don’t try to make you sad, rather they do the almost impossible act of making you think about something serious in two or three panels.

A great example of this is the strip on page 123 where Earl and Mooch are at the beach with the crab and a bird. The two non-felines say that they’ve been collecting all morning. The two cats logically assume that it’s plastic by asking it as an interrogative, Plastic? To which Crabby and the bird glibly say “plastic” as the reaming 2/3 of strip pans out to see a beach that’s littered with plastic.

The rest of the classic Mutts characters are there too, but as per most of the strips this is Earl and Mooches’ show. We also see the annual Shelter Stories that happen every May. As an ex-animal shelter employee these strips always appealed to us. They capture the love of stray animals; allude to the carelessness of humans and the hopeful nature of both that really capture their anthropomorphic spirit.

Our 10 year-old has loved Mutts for years. We stopped our newspaper subscription shortly before his birth and the possibility of them not knowing some of the classic comic strips was a concern for us. That is the benefit of collected books like these, especially for great strips like these. It provides a chance for those who don’t the strip a chance to discover them, but it also gives readers the opportunity to re-read them. That’s exactly what we and our oldest son do. This is a strip that’ll be in his library much like the Peanuts books I read and re-read when I was his age.