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Spaniel Rage
“I love [Davis’s] free-form drawing . . . She just has a funny, truthful voice.” ―Audrey Niffenegger Vanessa Davis’s autobiography, more observational than confessional, delighted readers ten years ago when she first began telling stories about her life in New York as a young single Jewish woman. Spaniel Rage is filled with frank and immediate pencil-drawn accounts of dating woes, misunderstandings between her and her mother, and conversations with friends. Her keen observation of careless words spoken casually is refreshingly honest, yet never condemning. Unabashedly, Davis offers up gently self-deprecating anecdotes about her anxieties and wry truths about the contradictions of life in the big city. These comics are sexy, funny, lonely, beautiful, spare, and very smart―the finest work from a natural storyteller. “[Davis creates] structurally sound, stylistically individual images that also manage to seem totally casual and spur-of-the-moment. The cliché “she makes it look so easy” is acutely appropriate for Vanessa and her work.”― Rookie “The frank, personal specificity of [ Spaniel Rage ] keeps you gripped.”― Vulture, 8 Comics You Need To Read “...a warm, familiar voice … Spaniel Rage holds an amazing freshness 12 years after it was published. It certainly deserves Drawn & Quarterly’s February reissue.”― Paste “[ Spaniel Rage collects] snapshots of her life that feel both utterly familiar and totally weird … a pleasant delve into young life in the city.”― Library Journal “Often funny, often tinged with loss, Davis chronicles a life page by page [and] touches on the anxieties of the internet age.”― The Comics Journal “This work [has] the strange power of making me feel like Davis broke into my apartment and scribbled her life into my personal notebook, just for me.”― Broken Pencil “An honest, unflinching set of loose cartoons… at its core, the commonalities of the cartoons in Spaniel Rage reflect the quirks of daily life itself.”― Bookriot, 5 Graphic Novels To Watch In For February “If you dig slice-of-life graphic novels, then you’ll want to pick up Spaniel Rage from Vanessa Davis … the graphic-novel equivalent of a Seinfeld episode about twentysomethings.”― London Free Pres s
120 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 2005
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179 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
March 16, 2017
Casual and fun. Like hanging out with a good friend.
February 21, 2017
In 2003, an artist living her post-college life in New York City made it her mission to draw one thing every day. Vanessa Davis didn't always manage to meet her goals, but the resulting book, Spaniel Rage is well worth the effort.
The most striking thing about Spaniel Rage is how relevant it feels today. Davis' illustrations date to 2003, and the book was originally published in 2005 by a now-defunct press. (Drawn + Quarterly re-released Spaniel Rage in 2017.) A lot has changed in that time, but the cartoon Vanessa's failures, triumphs and everyday banalities don't feel pulled from some distant yesteryear. In fact, the moral of Spaniel Rage's meandering story may be that young, single women from two ends of a generation — or even from separate generations — have more in common than we think.
If you're an artist, you'll find even more to relate to in Spaniel Rage. Davis' thing-a-day habit exposes the natural ups and downs of the creative life; sometimes you have it, sometimes you don't. When she doesn't, Davis writes a note in the margins about her perceived lack of talent for the day. It's those little intimacies that make Spaniel Rage such a joy to read.
Davis' book celebrates the daily little quirks that make life interesting, highlighting them with just the sort of low-key fanfare you do use your own thoughts and conversations. These aren't the phone-Mom-in-tears successes, but the quick anecdotes about petting cute dogs and spotting city legends. For all those you-had-to-be-there moments, Spaniel Rage is here.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.
April 16, 2017
Nope. Just no. I love a good diary comic but this was hot mess.
August 5, 2018
I love seeing how others journal - what they choose to record, how, etc but for some reason these daily comics fell a little short for me. I did like seeing how her drawings evolved by the end of the year!
Maybe it will sit better during a reread bc it was funny and personal.
Maybe it will sit better during a reread bc it was funny and personal.
July 10, 2017
Not gonna lie...from the title and cover, I was hoping for more comics with dogs in them.
January 30, 2008
This is a collection of Vanessa Davis's journal entries over a couple of years. I liked it because you can't really peice together everything, but there are just charming snippets. She obsesses about her hair and sits around in her underwear at home a lot, which might not sound engaging, but it really was. It is inspiring to do more journal-entries-as-comics i think.
April 23, 2008
I picked this graphic novel up initially because the drawing style reminded me of Lynda Barry. The drawings have a similar crude, yet secretly really skilled kind of quality that I like a lot and I like that the book is in a diary format. The writing isn't ground-breaking or anything, but it's got a nice day-in-the-life pacing to it.
May 8, 2021
Spaniel Rage is full of lively, humorous and honest observations. Davis gives space to the passing thoughts, indignities and conversation snippets that make up so much of life. Her lines are confident and persuasive: something about the way she draws her own body conveys how a body moves/ how it feels to be in a body. Delightful but also truthful.
August 6, 2007
best comics ever. its sorta roz chast without the oneliner, autobiographical and a little too heartbreakingly true to life.
August 24, 2017
Feels very personal and raw, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bit of a cringeworthy way -- it really feels like reading someone's diary. It's funny to open a book that I so associate with 2017 (in the press around its release, the binding style, etc), and to find it so thoroughly 2003 inside. I think I like that, though.
I do wish there were more dogs. Feel a little cheated on that front.
I do wish there were more dogs. Feel a little cheated on that front.
September 9, 2019
A diary in the form of daily moments. Lines from my notebook would not nearly be so interesting— not without the enhancement of drawings. There is a lot of available space surrounding these moments and the reader can glimpse a life. Perhaps even sense it more accurately than if it were laboriously detailed.
July 8, 2021
The author has a very pretty, almost effortless-looking art style. I really liked the little moments she chose to document, they felt so familiar that by the end of the book I felt like I knew her and she was my friend.
March 19, 2023
Love the collage style diary comics, and the early 2000s haircuts/outfits/computers make me so nostalgic! Sometimes the cursive is hard to read. Overall relatable, funny and timeless depiction of early/mid 20s-dom.
May 21, 2017
Uhhh this was meandering. And I totally wrote a review of it intended for Hot Dog Taste Test. And I am ashamed. Regardless. It was pretty good. Weird lady cartoonists are very important.
July 27, 2017
I liked these sketches a lot, the content was just extremely boring.
March 2, 2020
four stars for uncontrollable cackling & the perfect distillation of 2004 culture into diary comics
June 14, 2021
There is something about Vanessa Davis's pencil lines that is so TOTALLY YUMMY!!!!!
December 16, 2023
This felt a little rough to me, just random vignettes of daily life that were a little bland and dry and not always that amusing as the quotidian can be. Just not my kind of humor I think!
June 2, 2025
Short insights into a very specific point in a life, reminding me of others in my own.
May 28, 2012
Personal bloggers retire every day. It happens in waves in my Google Reader. Two down here, two down there. No one wants to fill the internet with the inane details of a day anymore. Unfortunately, that’s still what I like to read. I call it “The Curse of Knowing Who Eric Nies Is Syndrome,” or “Coming of Age at the Onset of Reality Television.” More than status updates and Tweets and links on Google+. I’m a sucker for the “And then we went to Trader Joe’s and I couldn’t find my car keys and.”
Cut to Vanessa Davis, one of my favorites in the comics biz, and her book “Spaniel Rage,” created right in the meat of the personal blogging era.
For a long time I’ve been wondering about The Life As Art. This is a reality TV-memoir hybrid that crosses artistic genres. What if every day you made something to represent something that happened that day. A drawing, a paragraph, a paper mache head. What would that compilation look like after 365 days? This would be a project that starts at Point A and finishes at Point Z, but the artist would have no idea what would happen at Point Z, even when they were at Point M. Would there be themes? Would the things that were considered highlight-worthy change in the course of a year? And just as important: What about the things that weren’t included. And, for the artist, at the end of the project they’d have lived an entire year as the subject of an art project in addition to just living an ordinary life.
Davis does this, kind of. The collection is a series of journal drawing she did between 2003 and 2004. Each is a self-contained entry marked with a date. There are no real themes or points of connection between the drawings, although co-stars sometimes make a return. There is Vanessa Davis wondering if her roommate is wearing her underwear and still glowing from a Junior Senior concert the previous night. She has a good hair day or she questions her relationships with dudes. She lies on the couch and watches 80s classics or goes to a dance party.
Some of these drawings are half-finished, eraser marks still visible. She’s inconsistent with her use of pen and pencil. I’m not sure why she does this, but it kind of adds to the whole charming package of Vanessa Davis, who is super relatable in her normalcy and itty-bitty fits of neurosis.
Cut to Vanessa Davis, one of my favorites in the comics biz, and her book “Spaniel Rage,” created right in the meat of the personal blogging era.
For a long time I’ve been wondering about The Life As Art. This is a reality TV-memoir hybrid that crosses artistic genres. What if every day you made something to represent something that happened that day. A drawing, a paragraph, a paper mache head. What would that compilation look like after 365 days? This would be a project that starts at Point A and finishes at Point Z, but the artist would have no idea what would happen at Point Z, even when they were at Point M. Would there be themes? Would the things that were considered highlight-worthy change in the course of a year? And just as important: What about the things that weren’t included. And, for the artist, at the end of the project they’d have lived an entire year as the subject of an art project in addition to just living an ordinary life.
Davis does this, kind of. The collection is a series of journal drawing she did between 2003 and 2004. Each is a self-contained entry marked with a date. There are no real themes or points of connection between the drawings, although co-stars sometimes make a return. There is Vanessa Davis wondering if her roommate is wearing her underwear and still glowing from a Junior Senior concert the previous night. She has a good hair day or she questions her relationships with dudes. She lies on the couch and watches 80s classics or goes to a dance party.
Some of these drawings are half-finished, eraser marks still visible. She’s inconsistent with her use of pen and pencil. I’m not sure why she does this, but it kind of adds to the whole charming package of Vanessa Davis, who is super relatable in her normalcy and itty-bitty fits of neurosis.
December 24, 2011
It could be my attention span, but I can't help but love reading pictures right now. It is instantaneous communication where there is no separation between the aesthetics and storytelling. Yea, pictures! I was delighted to find a copy of Vanessa Davis' book at the bookstore and get a chance to see what came before Make Me a Woman. It is still amazing art of honest autobiographic snippets. I was trying to think what about the pictures makes it feel so compelling and I think it may be the perspective of the drawings, as usually seen from an angle above each scene. It is like I am peeking down into her tiny stage of life drama. I can see how it must make her think and examine herself and her own thoughts. (This is of course stemming from my own contemplative mood brought on by the holidays and cloudy climates.) I could eat this book with a spoon.
August 5, 2012
Goofy, self-deprecating, unbearably hip auto-bio comics. It's hard to even use the word "comics" because they are really just odd ball sketches. Do you wear a resigned half smile while pondering the randomness of being in your 20's? If so, this book is all you. (Actually, I saw Ms. Davis at Reading Frenzy two years ago and she was hilarious! But ultimately this stuff is not my cup of tea.)
June 24, 2016
Loved this collection / scrapbook. Many of these pages were filled with short comics. Others were sketches / cartoons that were still very funny and VERY insightful. I laughed and felt very connected with Vanessa Davis through this. No big single story, just a really great scrapbook of comics and cartoons by an incredible comics author!
January 22, 2020
I was delighted when I saw that my local library decided to add this slender book to their catalog. I don't think I am the only one who would like to read it. Vanessa Davis clearly has some stature in the graphic world. I get the impression Vanessa Davis works a 9-to-5 as well.
Too short but delectable in the style of an afternoon lunch.
Too short but delectable in the style of an afternoon lunch.
November 26, 2012
Autobiographical, sketch-a-day format. Makes me want to try it, too! Maybe if I practice enough, I could draw. Hmmm...
I love how Davis draws herself, and represents herself so unself-consciously. I want to be her friend!
I love how Davis draws herself, and represents herself so unself-consciously. I want to be her friend!
January 17, 2008
didn't realize there were more sketches with captions than storylines. Still, you can see the growth in her and her work, very accessible, but the full length stories at the end were more my style.
August 5, 2015
Vanessa Davis, pls be my friend.
March 18, 2010
kindof ya but not ya. nice short read and the last story is heaps funny.
January 4, 2021
Reading it this time I kept feeling like she has a magic pencil. She makes drawing look so effortless, absolutely love her style...
May 28, 2016
Loved this, crude in some cases, hilarious and like an oversized 'zine essentially...a series of journal/diary drawings taken over a year or so...some great threads and some wonderful nonsense too.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews