Notes on Of Mice and Men Themes Notes on Of Mice and Men Themes This section contains 492 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) Of Mice and Men Topic Tracking: Animal (Lennie Described as an Animal) Animal 1: The first time we see Lennie, he is immediately compared to an animal: "...and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws." Chapter 1, pg. 2 . Throughout the novel there will be many such comparisons, and also occasional comparisons to children and the insane. But it is references to animals that occur most frequently. Such representations of Lennie as an animal color how we respond to him and how accountable we hold him for his actions. Therefore, it is significant that Steinbeck immediately mentions an animal when he first describes Lennie. Animal 2: After walking into the clearing, Lennie's first action is very animal-like. He falls to his knees and slurps water from the river, just as a horse might, or a dog drinking water from a bowl. George comments: "You'd drink out of a gutter if you was thirsty." Chapter 1, pg. 3 .

Here we have the image of a man who is not intelligent enough to check if the water is fresh, but who also drinks in a very animal-like fashion. Lennie's mental retardation comes across clearly, as he is presented as almost less than human. Lennie tries to hide his mouse from George, but it is no use. George demands the mouse. In the exchange is another animal comparison which also reveals something about George and Lennie's relationship: "Slowly, like a terrier who doesn't want to bring a ball to its master, Lennie approached, drew back, approached again." Chapter 1, pg. 9 . The task of caring for Lennie has fallen to George, who like a dog's "master", must watch Lennie every moment. Animal 3: In the description of how he used to play tricks on Lennie, the comparison between Lennie and George as dog and master is reinforced. George tells Slim that Lennie will do anything he tells him to, even jump into the river when he doesn't know how to swim. Much like a faithful dog, Lennie's love is unconditional. He follows orders, even when he doesn't know the harm they might cause.

Animal 4: During the fight between Curley and Lennie, both dog and sheep are used to describe Lennie: "Lennie covered his face with huge paws and bleated with terror." Chapter 3, pg. 63 . Animal 5: While taunting Lennie with the idea that George might not come back, Crooks predicts Lennie's fate without George: "Want me to tell ya what'll happen? They'll take ya to the booby hatch. They'll tie ya up with a collar, like a dog." Chapter 4, pg. 72 . Animal 6: After Lennie kills Curley's wife, he attempts to hide what he has done: "He pawed up the hay until it partly covered her." Chapter 5, pg. 92 . Animal 7: As he enters the brush, Lennie's movement is compared to that of a bear. When he gets to the river he falls to his knees and laps up the water like an animal, just as he did at the beginning of the book.

Dogs Never Lie About Love Dogs Never Lie About Love Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs By JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON Recognizing the Emotions of Dogs Few who have lived with dogs would deny that dogs have feelings. Taking a cue from his great friend Darwin, who spoke of conscience in the dog, George Romanes wrote that "the emotional life of the dog is highly developed--more highly, indeed, than that of any other animal." (He did not include the human animal, though perhaps he should have done so.) Of course dogs have feelings, and we have no trouble acknowledging most of them. Joy, for example. Can anything be as joyous as a dog? Bounding ahead, crashing into the bushes while out on a walk, happy, happy, happy. Conversely, can anything be as disappointed as a dog when you say, "No, we are not going for a walk"? Down he flops onto the floor, his ears fall, he looks up, showing the whites of his eyes, with a look of utter dejection. Pure joy, pure disappointment. But are this joy and disappointment identical to what humans mean when we use these words?

What dogs do, the way they behave, even the sounds they make, seem instantaneously translatable into human emotional terms. When a dog is rolling in fresh-cut grass, the pleasure on her face is unmistakable. No one could be wrong in saying that what she is feeling is akin to what any of us (though less often, perhaps) may feel. The words used to describe the emotion may be wrong, our vocabulary imprecise, the analogy imperfect, but there is also some deep similarity that escapes nobody. My dog may appear to feel joy and sorrow much the way I do, and the appearance here is critical: We often have no more to go on when it comes to our fellow humans. All dog caretakers (just another word for companion and friend) have marveled at the exuberant greeting their dogs give them after a brief absence. Sasha twirls around in delight, squealing and making extraordinary sounds. What accounts for this display of unbounded pleasure in our return? We tend to explain it by assuming a kind of stupidity: The dog thought I was gone forever. Dogs, we say, have no sense of time. As Robert Kirk of the Cornell Veterinary School once put it to me, dogs don't watch the clock.

Every minute is forever. Everything is for good. Out means gone. In other words, when dogs do not behave as we do, we assume it to be irrational behavior. Yet a lover is entranced to see the beloved again after even a brief absence--and dogs are all about love. (For a fuller discussion on dogs and love, see Chapter 3.) Another explanation for dogs' delight in our return may be found in the way in which puppies greet their mother. As soon as the mother appears, the puppies crowd around her, eager to nurse or expecting her to vomit food for them. Wolves have a greeting ceremony during which they wag their tales, lick one another, and bite the muzzles of other wolves. The pleasure of the puppies may be a vestige of this ceremony, as John Paul Scott and J. L. Fuller suggest. Soon after she joined the family, Sasha was sitting next to me one evening as I worked on an early draft of this chapter. I had been alone all day, working. There were just the two of us sitting in the living room, and it was very quiet. I looked over at Sasha and noticed that she was looking at me.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the thought: There is another being in this room, another consciousness. There is somebody here besides me. What, though, was Sasha thinking? Why did she suddenly glance up at me? Was she just checking to make sure I was still there, that I had nothing else in mind? Or was it a more complicated thought, one that was imbued (as many thoughts are) with feelings--affection, for example, or perhaps anxiety? She looked so peaceful, lying there. Was she feeling something like tranquillity? For certain Hindu philosophers, tranquillity is the master emotion, the one that underlies all others--it has been so fascinating to me that it was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis at Harvard. Perhaps I was merely projecting my own feelings on to Sasha. It is hard to know. As Sasha sat quietly next to me, looking contented, every so often sighing with what appeared to be contentment, I wondered what she was actually feeling. How I would love to be her for just one moment, to feel what she was feeling. I have had this desire, more than once, with people, too. Does one ever know what another human being is actually feeling?

It may be no harder to find out the truth about feelings in dogs than it is in people. The question of how we know what we feel, let alone what somebody else feels, is beset with difficulties. Speaking to other people, we often use shorthand: "I feel sad" or "I feel happy." But more often than not what we feel is an emotional state for which there are no precise verbal equivalents. Think of how we restrict ourselves with language. "I'm depressed," we say. Yet that is only the vaguest hint of a more complex set of feelings. It is probably the same for dogs; their joy is at least as complicated (in the sense that we are not always certain of its components; perhaps memory of earlier pleasure plays a role and perhaps it is entirely bound to the moment) and hard to define. While it is clear that we can learn a great deal about dogs from observing their behavior in terms of purely external actions, I think it is time to recognize that we could understand much more from observing how dogs feel. Moreover, we could learn something about our own feelings as well. For in the realm of feelings we can have no sense of superiority.

After a lifetime of affectionate regard for dogs and many years of close observation and reflection, I have reached the conclusion that dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely. By comparison the human emotional landscape seems murky with subterfuge and ambivalence and emotional deception, intentional or not. In searching for why we are so inhibited compared with dogs, perhaps we can learn to be as direct, as honest, as straightforward, and especially as intense in our feelings as dogs are. Freud remarked on the fact that"dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object relations." In other words, dogs are without the ambivalence with which humans seem cursed. We love, we hate, often the same person, on the same day, maybe even at the same time. This is unthinkable in dogs, whether because, as some people believe, they lack the complexity or, as I believe, they are less confused about what they feel.

It is as if once a dog loves you, he loves you always, no matter what you do, no matter what happens, no matter how much time goes by. Dogs have a prodigious memory for people they have known. Perhaps this is because they associate people with the love they felt for them, and they derive pleasure from remembering this love. Sasha is possessed by my two small kittens, Raj and Saj. The minute she sees these two tiny fur dots, she goes into hyper-alert mode. She begins to whine and to moan and to groan. She looks at me with a pleading look, as if I hold the key to helping her get what she so badly wants. She sniffs them. She follows them from room to room, whining piteously. The first night they were here, Sasha never slept at all. She lay on the floor next to their cage, crossed her feet daintily, and observed them all through the night. When I let them out, she gently put her paw on them.

The cats were a little dumbfounded by the whole thing, and especially at what Sasha took to doing by the second week: She would pick one up in her mighty jaws, taking great care not to harm him, carry him into another room, deposit him somewhere, and then head off to find the other one to do the same. Seeing her carrying these little orange dots from room to room was as puzzling for me as it was evidently for the cats. Soon, however, they wanted to play. One of the cats rolled over and reached out with his little paw. Yet their interest in Sasha is mild compared to hers in them. There can be no mistaking the intensity of her interest in these kittens. The nature of this interest is another matter. What does she want? Could it be that a maternal instinct has been awakened and Sasha wants to act as a mother to the kittens? Does she really think they are her puppies, and want to bring them into a den? Or is her interest predatory, in that she wants to eat them and is torn between her desire to listen to me ("Do not eat the kittens!") and her instincts as a predator telling her that a kitten makes a good meal?

Is she merely curious, wondering if these small beings are some odd kind of puppy? Maybe she is just herding them; she is after all a shepherd. None of these explanations is entirely satisfactory. If it were a mothering instinct at work, she would behave similarly to rabbits, say, or geese, moaning when she sees them (instead of chasing them). Moreover, Sasha has had no pups. I doubt that she wants to eat them; I can barely persuade her to eat a piece of steak. Nor is she stupid; she knows the difference between a dog and a cat. If she were herding the kittens, she would not pick them up in her mouth, nor moan and groan with some inexpressible need or feeling. The truth is that I don't know why she's so drawn to them, and nobody else knows either. It would be so much simpler if only we could ask, "Sasha, why are you so interested in these small fur balls?" "Simple, just look at how adorable they are!" Or "They look so small and helpless, I want to protect them." Or even "Beats me." Whatever the behavior means, it is clear that Sasha is filled with feeling for these little kittens.

It is clear because she moans and groans and follows them from room to room, and cocks her head and looks puzzled and intrigued. That is why I say she is possessed. She wants something from them, she feels something for them, and she seems to want to express those feelings. It is hard to empathize with her because humans generally do not walk behind kittens sighing and groaning. There does not seem to be an equivalent for us. Perhaps, then, Sasha is demonstrating to me one of my "pet theories": As well as the emotions animals and humans have in common, animals can also access emotions that humans do not share, ones different from those we know, because animals are other; they are not the same as human beings. Their senses, their experiences, open them to a totally different (or new) set of feelings of which we know little or nothing. That a whole world of canine feelings remains closed to us is an intriguing notion. Some of these feelings could be based on the dog's sensory capacities. According to one early authority, a dog can smell 100 million times better than we do (I will return to the topic in Chapter 5).

But even if the true figure is significantly less, the fact remains that when Sasha puts her nose to the ground, she becomes aware of a world about which I can only make guesses. Similarly, when Sasha cocks her ears, she hears sounds of which I am altogether unaware. In the case of Sasha's interest in the kittens, we are dealing not with a question of superior (or inferior) sensory capacities but something else, something social. We like to assume that dogs and humans are social in very similar ways, and that therefore humans are uniquely qualified to understand whatever emotions a dog may have based on belonging (like us) to a pack. We, too, have deep interests in one another's social lives and the web of interrelations interdependence creates. We assume this is why dogs are able to understand us so well, and appear to empathize with humans from their own direct experience. Perhaps they are so often right about human emotions because their social world is similar to ours. We are not similar to cats in the same way, and cats are not all that good at understanding us. We do not expect the same kind of sympathy from our cat as we do from our dog. A cat the size of a lion would be an animal we would approach with some hesitation.

No matter what size, however, most of us would accept a reliable dog as being reliable. The German ethologist P. Leyhausen, an expert on the cat family, makes the point that nobody chose to domesticate the cat; it chose domestication itself, while nevertheless maintaining its independent nature. He believes that the cat is domestic, but not domesticated. The German scholar Eberhard Trumler suggests that it was not wolves who joined the human fold but the opposite. He pointed out that wolves, phylogenetically older than us and superbly equipped for hunting, had no need of human help. Men, on the other hand, derive from plant-eating ancestors and are not nearly as well equipped for hunting as are wolves. In order to eat, wolves scarcely need us at all, but we could benefit from the help of wolves. It may well be that human groups followed wolf packs, waited until they had brought down a kill, then chased the wolves away. Indian wolves are often chased away from their kills by wild pigs, and the same could have been true of early humans and wolves. The naturalist and writer Jared Diamond points out that the large mammals were all domesticated between 8000 and 2500 B.C.

Domestication began with the dog, then moved to sheep, goats, and pigs, and ended with Arabian and Bactrian camels and water buffalos. He believes that since 2500 B.C. there have been no significant additions. Why this is so is a question that has never been answered. Although other animals have been domesticated--primarily the cat, the horse, certain birds, rabbits, cattle--no other animal (wild, tame, or domesticated) carries such meaning for humans as the dog. We feel strongly about such nondomesticated animals as wolves, elephants, and dolphins (all of which can be tamed but over whose reproductive life we exercise little control), but our direct interactions with them are much more restricted. By raising all these domesticated animals over centuries, we have altered their genetic makeup to make them conform to our desires. We control their reproductive functions and breed them to suit our needs, just as we control their territory and food supply. Juliet Clutton-Brock, an expert on domestication, believes, as Darwin did, that only humans benefit from the association.

She quotes Darwin to the effect that "as the will of man thus comes into play we can understand how it is that domestic races of animals and cultivated races of plants often exhibit an abnormal character, as compared with natural species; they have been modified not for their own benefit, but for that of man." Michael Fox, a dog expert and Humane Society vice president (in charge of bioethics and farm animal protection), points out that rapid maturation, disease resistance, high fertility, and longevity, all of which we foster in domesticated animals, would in nature produce overabundance of certain species, which would cause a shift in the ecological balance (and possibly the extinction of other species). Many of these domesticated animals, even when they appear to be semi-wild, are dependent on humans and require considerable attention. Even hardy hill sheep still need to be dipped, wormed, and given supplementary winter feed. Even among domesticated animals, the dog stands out as perhaps the only fully domesticated species. Goats are domesticated, and can be tame, but they rarely make intimate companions. Pigs probably could, if given half a chance. H.

Hediger, the director of the Zoological Gardens of Zurich, writes that the dog, basically a domesticated wolf, was the first creature with which humans formed intimate bonds that were intense on both sides. According to Hediger, no other animal stands in such intimate psychological union with us; only the dog seems capable of reading our thoughts and "reacting to our faintest changes of expression or mood." German dog trainers use the term Gefuhlsinn (a feeling for feelings) to talk about the fact that a dog can sense our moods. Voltaire, who knew about the emotions of dogs, used the example of a lost dog to refute the thesis of Descartes that dogs are merely machines, incapable of any kind of suffering. He responded to Descartes in his Dictionnaire philosophique with: Judge this dog who has lost his master, who has searched for him with mournful cries in every path, who comes home agitated, restless, who runs up and down the stairs, who goes from room to room, who at last finds his beloved master in his study, and shows him his joy by the tenderness of cries, by his leaps, by his caresses.

Barbarians seize this dog who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship. They nail him to a table and dissect him alive to show you the mesenteric veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling that you possess. Answer me, mechanist, has nature arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal in order that he should not feel? Does he have nerves to be impassive? It is one of the main themes of this book that the reason why humans and dogs have such an intense relationship is that there is a mutual ability to understand one another's emotional responses. The joie de vivre of a dog may be greater than our own, but it is immediately recognizable as a feeling that we humans enjoy as well. The closeness between dogs and people is taken for granted and, at the same time, seen as something immensely mysterious. Naturally I feel close to my dogs, but who are these dogs? They are Sima, Sasha, and Rani, of course, that much is simple and obvious. Yet I will often look at them lying in my study as I work on this book and be overwhelmed with a sense of otherness.

Just who are these beings lying here, so close to me, and yet also so remote? They are easily grasped, and they are unfathomable. I know them as well as I know my closest friend, and yet I have no idea who they are. This ambiguity, which includes a certain ambivalence as well, has been memorialized in our speech, in our sayings, and in our tributes to and about dogs. Sir John Davies, in his epigram In Cineam (written in 1594), observed: Thou sayest thou art as weary as a dog, As angry, sick, and hungry as a dog, As dull and melancholy as a dog, As lazy, sleepy, idle as a dog. But why dost thou compare thee to a dog? In that for which all men despise a dog, I will compare thee better to a dog. Thou art as fair and comely as a dog, Thou art as true and honest as a dog, Thou art as kind and liberal as a dog, Thou art as wise and valiant as a dog.

Ever since Madame Roland said in the eighteenth century "Plus je vois les hommes, plus j'admire les chiens" (The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs), generally what has been written about dogs tends to be positive. Sometimes it is even wonderful, as in William James's statement "Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as is his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor." Or it may be delicious, like Ambrose Bierce's definition in his Devil's Dictionary, "Dog, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship." Samuel Coleridge, in Table-Talk (May 2, 1830), was one of the first to note that "the best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter ... may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to him ... may become traitors to their faith....

The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog." When it comes to our sayings and our language, the use to which the word dog has been put shows a darker side. We speak of "going to the dogs" when we mean utter ruination. When men say of a woman that she is a dog, they mean nothing kind. Even used of a man, it suggests that he is contemptible. "To put on the dog" is to be a phony. "A dog's death" is the most miserable and shameful of ends. As long ago as the eighteenth century, "the black dog" on a man's back referred to depression. We criticize our own society when we speak of a "dog-eat-dog world," though this phrase may derive from its Latin opposite: Canis caninam non est, a dog does not eat another dog.

One of the most evocative phrases of the English language was quoted by John Lyly in 1519 as being already an old saying: "The dogs may bark; the caravan goes on." I take my dogs on five walks each day. People who know about us say that these dogs are living the perfect dog's life. Maybe we need to revamp our vocabulary so that leading a dog's life is what we want and going to the dogs is where we wish to go. Joel Savishinsky, in an article on "Pet Ideas," notes the ambiguity in our language about dogs: A winning individual is top dog; a handicapped or underrated person an underdog. Pathetic individuals lead a dog's life in a dog-eat-dog world. They suffer through the dog days of August, and when they confuse their priorities or do things in an inverted way, we think of it as the tail wagging the dog. A person who hogs resources which he himself cannot use is a dog in the manger. A damaged book is dog-eared, lousy poetry is doggerel, and a pathetic look is a hang-dog expression.

The best we can say about a dutiful but uninspired worker is that he is dogged. Nobody has written about this better than James Thurber in a piece that deserves full quotation: Dogs may be Man's best friend, but Man is often Dog's severest critic, in spite of his historic protestations of affection and admiration.... He observes, cloudily, that this misfortune or that shouldn't happen to a dog, as if most slings and arrows should, and he describes anybody he can't stand as a dirty dog. He notoriously takes the names of the female dog and her male offspring in vain, to denounce blackly members of his own race. In all this disdain and contempt there is a curious streak of envy, akin to what the psychiatrists know as sibling rivalry. Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog. It is possible that we begrudge the dog his freedom to be exactly what he was meant to be: a dog.

So often I will see Sasha or Rani or Sima roll over and over in thick green grass, with a look of sheer delight on their faces, and I will think they are doing exactly what a dog was meant to do. How much harder to say of ourselves that we are doing what a human was meant to do, especially as nobody knows what that is. Setting aside what we think dogs are, what--or who--do dogs think we are? If we knew how we were represented in the dreams of dogs (for they do dream about us--see Chapter 10), we would have an answer. But we do not, and so we must use our knowledge of dog society to extrapolate. The general observation has always been: Dogs form packs; the leader of the pack is the strongest, wisest, and largest individual; a human being among dogs fits that description; ergo we are the leader of any dog pack. But there are a number of problems with this view. First, we really don't know all that much about hierarchy in dogs, although we think we do.

We assume that dominance is a simple matter, but it is not, and we can never be certain what factors are involved, or even exactly what dominance is among dogs. Secondly, dogs are not stupid, and they certainly know that we are not dogs, or even superdogs. I do not believe (contrary to what some vets say) that a dog thinks a cat is a small dog. How they categorize them, I do not know, but I am confident they know they are not dogs. Frances and Richard Lockridge find it easy to believe that a dog would like to be a man, in the same way as a man would like to cast himself in the image of God.

In their book, Cats and People, they write that the ambition of a well-brought-up dog is to please his friend before himself: "He is demonstrative in displays of affection as many people are, and as almost all people would like others to be toward them; the dog leaves you no doubt where you stand and when he gives his devotion, as he does readily, he is apt to give it fulsomely, so that for a little while the meanest human can see himself godlike in the dog's beaming eyes." Do dogs think of us as gods, powerful beings who cannot entirely be read? I think not, because the idea of a "god" comes from the way humans create gods: in our own image, only more powerful. Gods grant us wishes and decide our fate. It is true that dogs are entirely dependent on us when they are with us. We decide where to go, how long to stay, when to leave, what they can and cannot do. Some people compare dogs with slaves. But does the fact that we have created an almost complete dependency in dogs make them similar to slaves? We should remember that dogs have no choice in the matter.

The Stockholm syndrome, where the kidnapped fall in love with their jailers (sometimes well beyond the limits of their confinement), may well apply here. To a certain extent, we are the jailers of dogs, since any freedom they achieve must be acquired by wheedling it out of us. This is one good reason they learn to read us so well. Survival dictates that dogs learn about us and learn to play us to some extent. Dogs must learn to negotiate whatever freedom they achieve within the confines we assign them. They seem to accept this control we exercise over them as the way things are. Dogs who rebel we call problem dogs. Perhaps they are merely independent thinkers, wondering why they should accept the status quo. Given the fascination almost all dogs feel for small children (it is mutual), what do dogs think small children are? Do they think, "Aha, this is more like it, they are like us"? Do they see the dependency? Is that what they see as the similarity? Is it the size? Or is it just part of neoteny; since they are like children to us, do they have a desire to be with "other" children?

One reason dogs play havoc with so many of our theories is that dogs do not have feelings toward all humans, only some. So a dog can be extremely aggressive toward some human beings and very gentle toward others. The famous protectiveness of the dog speaks for the distinctions dogs make: stranger/friend, master/enemy, etc. We must not forget that a dog is really a wolf, and thus is in much of its makeup and behavior a wild animal, albeit one that has allowed us to become a part of its world. This is something no other wild animal would ever do, even when they seem in some ways to respect humans. For animals in the wild, humans are usually something dangerous and to be avoided. But not always. Killer whales, for example, seem to have an almost superstitious interest in us: There are no documented cases of killer whales killing a human without provocation, although they could easily do so. After all, they eat just about anything that moves in the ocean, even polar bears, so why not us? They seem to recognize some affinity. That affinity may have to do with living as social beings in well-defined groups.

In this way dogs, whales, and humans share much in common--although whales never show a desire to spend time with us over spending time with other whales. We could never become part of a killer-whale pod (which is one reason so little is known about killer whales). In fact, no other species has ever indicated that it regularly prefers the company of a human to that of members of its own species, with the single exception of the dog. While we have domesticated many animals, only the dog has domesticated us. The dog chooses us, not because it is confused about our identity, not because dogs think we are the marvel of creation, but merely because dogs love us. It is such an amazing fact, and so counterintuitive (so profoundly unlovable do we think we are) that almost nobody can accept it as fact. Dogs love us not only because we feed them, or walk them, or groom them, or protect them, but because we are fun. How astonishing! (C) 1997 Jeffrey Masson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-609-60057-5 Bearmageddon Bearmageddon From the creator of Axe Cop.

Bearmageddon follows a group of slackers as the world is being taken over by bears. Posted In: Blog , News Hey, Bearmanauts! Duran here to bring you another webcomic review! Hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season! This week’s number one choice is Puck created by the ElectricGecko! Puck is one of the most popular webcomics online. I’m sure after reading the review about this gut-busting comic, you’re going to head on over to the site and devour every comic from beginning to end, absorb every single syllable with utter gusto! I know I did! Puck is a weekly comic started by ElectricGecko back in 1998. While in his animation program he decided to jump headfirst into this passion project and he never looked back. The initial Puck run actually predates Google which makes it one of the older of the current crop of webcomics online. The creator likes to refer to himself as ElectricGecko to keep his teaching career and his webcomic career separate.

After some time of doing the comic book, he stopped at Puck 80 in February of 2000, only to come back to it and presenting it in 2013 on DeviantArt. The support he received was tremendous enough that he started consistently turning them out and hasn’t looked back since! He’s currently working on issue 367! This is a testament to not giving up, kiddos! Don’t lose track of your dreams, and no matter the journey or how elusive the path. Stick with it! Now let’s get to the comic itself! Puck is a satirical comic that pokes fun at pop culture and various events. It’s a wonderful story about a red-headed unemployed fairy(ish) mother with anger management issues named–Puck! Once Puck finds a tot named Daphne on her doorstep and decides to adopt her. Now a mom, she decides that her clearest path to success is to get a college education. Puck is a character that’s very loosely based on a Shakespearian character who itself is based in English folklore. That would make her over 600 years old, but she never mentions her past.

The story was originally intended to incorporate folklore and such characters but that idea was superseded by the idea to make it more about contemporary satirical situations. The story generally keeps within the PG-13 range and doesn’t delve into the NSFW content. It’s generally episodic without any major story arcs. It’s a light and irreverently humor-filled comic. The artwork is superb and crisp. What’s wonderful about the comic book is the consistency. One gets pretty spoiled week by week seeing the crisp, professionally done character designs as well as the top notch lettering and colors all done by ElectricGecko. It’s obvious by reading the comic book that it took great dedication to make so many of these webcomics (over 361 episodes so far). The supporting characters are numerous, each with their own unique personalities and appeals. It’d take forever to even begin to delve into the Puck world. It’s a glorious read for anyone that wants to kick back and who’s looking for a light-hearted escape. You can check out and support Puck at the following sites: Homepage: Posted In: Blog , News Hey Bearanauts! Duran’s back to share with you another amazing webcomic review!

This week, we’ll be checking out TwoKinds, which is an amazingly beautiful and refreshing story created by Tom Fischbach. It’s been around for over 13 years and it’s going strong in popularity online. Twokinds is a webcomic that must resolve its racial tensions between conflicting groups: the human-like people and the animal-like beings called Keidrans. They have a very different idea of what is the way to live and go about their lives. Their differences in customs and traditions have caused conflict and stratification between the two groups. The story kicks off with the world at the brink of war. In a twist, it is revealed that it is being manipulated by a human who has no memory of the crime he perpetrated. In this world, there’s three major races, the Humans, The Keidrans, and the Basitins. The Humans are the more technologically advanced and curious race who use their tech to subdue and enslave many of the Basitins. The Basitins are a shorter lived, feline and canine race of beings who share a centuries old, collective contempt for the human beings. The Basitins are a generally furry race. They keep themselves isolated from everyone.

Theirs is a more hive-like spartan type of society. The story begins from the perspective of a human named Trace who must resolve to regain his memories and discover what role he’s playing in this volatile world. What’s great about reading webcomics is that one gets to see the progress from where it started, and as you read along, you continue to see it advance and grow. The storytelling devices become more sophisticated and effective. Reading TwoKinds is a perfect example of following the development and the creative evolution of the talented Tom Fischbach. There’s a lot of teenage angst, and hormonal elements to this web series, but it doesn’t get carried away. It’s something that teens and preteens can relate to, like budding relationships, being self-conscious, jealousy, crushes, etc. If you get a chance, be sure to check out this comic book! You would be very happy you did. It tells an elaborate story without being convoluted. It’s a great escape and one of the top-notch more quality webcomics out there today!

Check out TwoKinds and Tom Fischbach at these social sites: Posted In: Blog , News Hey everyone in Bear country, Duran’s here again to bring you another fantastical webcomic review! This week’s selection is the amazeballs webcomic simply called NHOJ by the stupendously talented creator simply referring to himself as John Cullen. It’s a quirky daily comic that makes me think of the fantastically weird and hilarious The Far Side comics by Gary Larson. It’s amazing that he’s been doing this comic DAILY for almost 3 years! His dailies (incorporating everything from journal comics to absurdist humor, to riffs on pop culture), since January 2014. That takes serious dedication! One has to admire the time and the effort he put into this labor of love. It’s an amazing accomplishment that should be applauded. Each comic has the same high-quality visuals, lettering, and sardonic humor. I must say, I want whatever high-energy protein bars he’s been taking!

His most recent daily was released October, 27th, and after reading it, I say with full confidence, that I have a new favorite word, and it’s “jaysus!” I’m going to take a wild guess and say that he’s an Irish creator working out of Ireland! I made this deduction by his use of “humour” and words such as that which means he’s from at least across the pond. He speaks about living in Ireland, I’m not a detective here, but maybe that might be the case! Whatever the case is, these are some of the most fantastic dailies you can find anywhere! None of the dailies he released are connected in any way whatsoever. Each comic has its own unique idea or joke. It makes me nostalgically harken back to my early Sunday mornings skimming to the back pages where all the comic strips were. Most of them had no continuous story, just funny anecdotes, and punchlines. They were mostly just cute, amusing, rarely drop off your chair bust a gut laughing kinda jokes. But what they DID do consistently was put a smile on my face, and made me feel better about my morning, even if it was for that short few minutes.

That was the magic of those comic strips. This comic definitely captures that kind of magic. There’s an innocence to it that accomplishes what I’d imagine the creator set out to do, which is to at the very least put a smirk on your face! Check out his comics, I’m sure you’ll find it to be as much a treat as I thought it was! Posted In: Blog , News Hey guys! The webcomic that I’m going to be reviewing this week is visually stupendous in every way. It’s called Impossible Jack by the legendary CreatureBox team! CreatureBox consists of two self-described monster wrangling artists who go by the name of Dave Guertin and Greg Baldwin. They’ve been doing this for a while now, having worked with Insomniac games since 2000 helping craft the now classic Ratchet and Clank games. Things have not slowed down for them in the least with current projects. Impossible Jack is a webcomic that has been stalled for some time now (July 27th, 2014), but the sheer majesty of its limited run gives me reason enough to want to share this sequential spectacle.

The story follows the exploits of Impossible Jack as he ventures to save some school children who find themselves being attacked by monstrous mushroom creatures one of the children refer to as “Shroomies”. The rescue mission seems to be going as planned for our intergalactic hero until a sudden turn of events elevates the danger-dial up a couple hundred notches. In the beginning of the story we see our heroes in the middle of this tentative entanglement, before they flashback to how they got into the mess to begin with. The character design is out of this world (pardon the pun), with so many characters having their own rhythm and feel. It’s not always the case that the inking and the coloring match the stunning optically-orgasmic illustrations, but this is it! One can’t help but stop at a page just fawning over the energy and detail put into this comic. The lettering is fabulous as well. There’s literally no let up in quality for this webcomic. It sets a bar for webcomics that we’re seeing more and more of today. It’s unfortunate that there have not been any more pages for the Impossible Jack comic strips. I sometimes wonder what they had planned for the story.

I would have loved to have known where were they going with it. Hopefully, they can explore this world again one day and treat us to the fantastical universe of monsters and aliens once more! You can check out Creaturebox and all their ingenious work at: Posted In: Blog , News Rising Sand is a webcomic series by Ty Dunitz and Jenn Lee. With luminescent artwork and multi-layered storytelling. This looks to become a solid classic and obligatory reading material if it isn’t already. The story centers around two well-intentioned hustlers who live in the outskirts of Ras Huran which is a port city in a world named Erj. The youngest is a witty and resourceful 13-year-old female Sylph named Dal. Dal ran away from her family to survive out on her own in the hustle and bustle life of the shanty and crowded port city. She survives by thieving and hustling through the local markets. Her friend and protector, Qebrus is the muscle of the two. He believes if he collects enough wealth (gold and glass being of value), he can make it to a heavenly afterlife and become one with the Luminous Body cult.

The story is still relatively new and jumps between the symbiotic journey of Dal and Qebrus and Dal’s troubled older sister Ro. Ro is a 25-year-old young woman who’s a member of the Astral Templar. A small group of zealots who defend the moral and religious core of her Sylph race. Anyone who is a non-believer or seeks to disgrace the culture gets torn to shreds. She delights too much in the violence. So much so that her fellow Templars find it problematic. The Templar Mission Council seem to also be taking notice of her blood-thirst. Will she find herself having to answer for her behavior? Maybe, maybe not. I look forward to finding out how this plays out. The world is fleshed out in such a manner that one gets the sense of an almost hopelessness for the people within this realm. It feels like they live in a post-POST apocalyptic world, where there are no forests, there are no birds, no sense of life that flourishes anywhere. Even the rich are managing in some way to stay above the fray.

Week by week the world is expanding methodically before us, but consistent is this sense of vast yet claustrophobic tension I get when reading it. Another thing that jumps out is the collision course that is being masterfully established between Dal’s ultra-violent older sister and Dal and Qebrus. The tension between the two sisters was established in a flashback. We still don’t know the specifics of what exactly caused Dal to run away but we can imagine that it has much to do with her sister as her frustration with her people’s religious obsessions. Ro is impatient with anything and everyone, so I can almost see where this is possibly going. The story already has sunk it’s teeth into me, so I have to find out what’s going to end up happening. A great job is being done to set the stage for something dramatic and ultra brutal. The reason why I feel this extremely graphic incident is almost inevitable is because it’s been already illustrated to us that this is capable of happening in this world. One particular scene that introduces her sister Ro shows us that without hesitation. It’s just one scene, but the extremely efficient and sufficient enough to let us know that this story will not hold back on showing us the finality to its characters.

What I love about the use of violence in this web-series is that they use it deliberately and purposefully. It’s not done loosely, but as an element vital to the story structure, so when we see it, it’s mandated. So far there’s only been one scene like that and it’s had a lasting effect. I’m enjoying this webcomic so far. Tu Dunitz (writer) is really doing an excellent job establishing the setting, the character, and their trajectory. Its characters are already people I care about and worry about. The tragic character of Ro is someone I’m already interested in delving deeper into. I’m worried for our main characters when they inevitably run into this psychopath. The comic has a dream-like lamination about it due to the blissful design, coloring and inks done by Ty Dunitz and the psychedelic nature of the design, pencils and inks done by Jenn Lee . The characters seem to twist in the wind and in our mind as we canvas the panels. I feel like I had a dream about this other world with its unbearably dry heat and alien-like food and architecture only to wake up feeling like I returned transformed by my travel there. I can’t recommend this comic book enough.

It’s comic and dialogue structure perpetually feeds into it’s expanding world. I’m confident in saying that reading through this webcomic will transport you to a place that seems familiar and alien at once. The basic elements and troubles of these people and their polarized living conditions make it something any reader can recognize. They’ve done an excellent job setting us up for some kind of a crash at some point. That’s why I’m going to continue reading this. I can’t wait to see it finally happen. I’m sure when it does, it will leave an indelible mark. This is why we love webcomics! You can check out Rising-Sand at: Follow the webcomic on Twitter at: Also check out Tu Dunitz at: And Jenn Lee at: Support their amazing creative efforts on Patreon: Duran Rivera As an Illustrator, Writer, and Entrepreneur, I’ve had the boundless pleasure to work with various talents and creative organizations. Add me on Instagram @ Drnriv or on Facebook: Posted In: Blog , News , Uncategorized Old fans of AxeCop might remember Dr. McNinja from their epic team up .

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s an intro to one of the funniest webcomics on the net… Dr. McNinja is a webcomic developed by Christopher Hastings, who has been a friend of Axe Cop and Bearmageddon from the early days of both. It started in 2003 as a one-off but has since been a regularly scheduled webcomic since. It follows the misadventures of Dr. McNinja who’s a middle-aged doctor who happens to also be a ninja. It’s humor mixes well with the action and serves to fuel its unquestionable charm. What started out as a humble idea through an internet forum site, then as an art class comic, turned into a multi-media success story that continues to this day with video game ventures and other possibilities down the pipe. Dr. McNinja is a ninja with uncanny speed, the agility and reaction time to be able to dodge bullets, and superhuman strength. His medical proficiency runs from his medical training under the clone of Benjamin Franklin. He has a degree in various fields making him an expert Dr., dentist, and podiatrist. One starts to notice that Dr. McNinja has some unique quirks about him.

For one, he’s a die-hard Batman fanatic. He also has a propensity for lying about his past, telling others that he’s trained with Batman. His personality is actually more like Spiderman with the wit and banter during battles with various super-villains. The artwork of Dr. McNinja is top notch, the artist has a great ability to switch up the camera angles in dynamic ways during action scenes, and manages to pace the more dialogue heavy scenes in a way that keeps it interesting, moving the scene along. There’s such an absurdity about the comic book that I can’t help but feel tantalized by every introduction to a new character or new place. The villains are over the top– pretty much all the supporting characters are a bit out there, especially his trusted sidekick Gordito Delgado who looks like a cowboy but is actually a 12-year-old who through sheer will-power has grown himself an EPIC handlebar mustache. Delgado also rides his beloved velociraptor called Yoshi. Yoshi has a bit of an attitude and doesn’t let anyone but Gordito ride him. In case you don’t know Spanish, Gordito is an endearing term which means “little fat one”.

What’s great about this comic is that it’s very self-aware and it unabashedly embraces it’s tongue in cheek humor. I love that it doesn’t hold punches and that it dares to be raw and funky. It’s assortment of weird stories and funky characters left me wanting more. Have no fear, there’s lots of material to read through since it’s been around for a while. If you’re looking for a webcomic that’s packed with action, story-arcs, and tons of aberrant humor, this is just what the Dr. ordered.– See what I did there? You can check out Dr. McNinja at: DrMcNinja.com Follow Chris Hastings on Twitter Support Chris Hastings on Patreon Duran Rivera As an Illustrator, Writer, and Entrepreneur, I’ve had the boundless pleasure to work with various talents and creative organizations. I’ve thrown my hat in many circles to stimulate, challenge and improve myself as an overall creator. My goals are to create and publish my own stories as an artist and writer. Follow Duran Rivera on Instagram Follow Duran Rivera on Twitter

Question: If someone is referred to as "ursine", what animal are they being compared to?
Answer: Bear