When illustrator David Hughes approached his fiftieth birthday, he turned himself in at his local surgery for a mid-life MOT and was not overwhelmingly surprised to be told by his GP that he was drinking far too much and exercising far too little. Although both of these slothful habits suited Hughes down to the ground, their adverse implications with regard to his projected lifespan prompted his family to decide that Hughes needed to shape-up and that the best method for him to do so would be to buy a dog and then proceed to walk it.

Two weeks later, on a Sunday, we drove to Uttoxeter to choose our detox terrier. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted a dog.

The dog is to be very generously given to Hughes as a birthday present. At the Saredon Kennels in Uttoxeter Hughes encounters a depressed looking wire haired fox terrier named Murphy who was the father of the litter that Hughes and his family had come to view. Although he feels a certain affinity with Murphy (“I still wasn’t sure if I wanted a dog but I wanted to take Murphy home. He needed rescuing, obviously the life of a stud isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”), Hughes is persuaded that a puppy would be a more suitable companion for him and so Dexter is chosen to join the family.

At Macclesfield, an hour later, Dexter was sick in the car.

It might not have been a match made in heaven at the very beginning, but Hughes and Dexter soon began to bond and their walks form the backbone of Walking the Dog. Through the sequences of pencil drawings, Hughes records his impressions as he meanders along with Dexter; he dissects the characters of the fellow dog walkers (and their dogs) that they encounter and chronicles the thoughts that come to mind as he strolls along with a recently scooped bag of poop in his hand.

But Walking the Dog is far more than a straightforward ‘one man and his dog’ tale. As the novel progresses Hughes’ thoughts turn to moments from his past and, all too often, he focuses on dark episodes of violence and murder. Walking the Dog is actually quite hard to categorise. Initially it has the appearance of being a memoir in the form of a graphic novel, but the gentle humour of the early pages is quickly engulfed in doom and depression as Hughes begins to record the fantasies and obsessions that lurk in his mind while he is out walking Dexter. The dog walking might be the thread that holds the book together but, rather than offering a purely conventional narrative, Walking the Dog is actually a collection of memories, unrelated recollections and misanthropic rants against the world.

I’m walking the dog it’s my new career 4 years 3 months we’ve been walking. My father was a plumber, a painter and a decorator for fifty five years. Turner was a painter. My mother used to ask … “Why can’t you draw something nice? Why don’t you get a proper job?” During the 2^nd World War she stitched goggles in Turner’s house.

Its fragmentary nature has the effect of making Walking the Dog a rather difficult book to get into, certainly far more so than the majority of other graphic novels that it will share shelf space with, but it is well worth the effort. Hughes’ artwork is sublime and the fractured reminiscences that he has captured sparkle with extraordinary imagination and insight. With so many unrelated and complex threads running through one novel, it would have been easy for the reader to feel disengaged but Hughes succeeds in using the device of walks with Dexter to pull everything together while allowing the reader to concentrate on those elements that they find particularly engaging. As a graphic novel, Walking the Dog is a marvellous accomplishment and something of a landmark, combining as it does traditional comics artistry with photography, collage and commercial graphic design techniques.

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