4 out of 5

Lafler has a Crumb-esque stiffness to his drawing style – the stiff-legged, single-jointed characters, the thick, round pencils / inks and shading, the angular perspectives – and writes with that slightly drug-tweaked sense of surrealism that fellow indie guys from his scene seem to have.  Where his contemporaries would lean more on gross-out humor, or more on anger, or more on philosophical wandering, Lafler’s work would generally balance on a tight-rope of silly and straight-forward, pursuing themes for a couple pages before having a random aside.  Dog Boy vol. 2 – vol. 1 being a self-published affair – starts out pretty damn amazingly, the first couple issues plucking around DB’s world with friends Knoot and Benb and girlfriend Dog Girl, the grounding in reality – Knoot quitting his job, for example – only giving way to incredible weirdness that just sort of keeps flowing.  If Lafler hits a wall, he just draws that wall differently so that suddenly there’s a corner to walk around, and then he keeps going.

During the course of this short series, though, he began including more and more of the reality – some Reagan references, Knoot’s drinking problems – and it’s never quite serious and still doesn’t stay on a point for more than a couple pages, but Dog Boy stops feeling like a different world and starts feeling like a human character who just happens to be drawn by a dog.  It looks zany as hell, and there are just some truly amazingly laughable panels with one-liners that come from nowhere but don’t have the forced random feel of some other authors, just the mood of the book shifts slightly.  Overall, what’s most rewarding about Dog Boy is that despite his gruffness, and the look of the art, which leads us into thinking this is an “adult” book (some genitalia here, some protruding nipples there), there’s a jovial spirit to it that makes it completely re-readable.  Sometimes this stuff gets too preachy or too experimental, but Lafler was having fun – occasionally putting some thought into the fun, but more often than not just letting his mind and pen wander on the page – and that spirit of freedom being the underlining principle of the book prevents it from ever feeling outdated in style or content, even 20 years on.