Pit's Letter

by Sue Coe

Like a latter-day Goya, Sue Coe is driven to create moral works, from stark renditions of slaughterhouse brutality to accounts of abused domestic animals and laboratory testing. In Pit's Letter, a hapless canine describes her desolate life to her only surviving sister. She recounts her puppyhood and upbringing in her human family, her heartless banishment, and finally her suffering and death at the hands of the experimenting scientists at Eden Biotechnology. Ironically, her former master winds up in the same situation: an accidental scratching infects him with a pathogen - and man and beast share the same fate.

Genres: Comics, Fiction, Graphic Novels

48 pages, Hardcover

First published June 21, 2000

About the author

Sue Coe grew up next to a slaughterhouse in Liverpool. She studied at the Royal College of Art in London and left for New York in 1972. Early in her career, she was featured in almost every issue of Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking magazine Raw, and has since contributed illustrations to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Nation, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Details, The Village Voice, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire and Mother Jones, among other publications. Her previous books include Dead Meat (winner of the 1991 Genesis Award) and Cruel. Among her many awards are the Dickinson College Arts Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art, and a National Academy of Arts Award (2009).

Reviews

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heart rending story of Pit...a dog who can't fathom the cruelty of man. Really makes you wonder why we are so insensitive to the suffering of other creatures; it is almost as if we feel a sense of unlimited entitlement to treat animals (and, our fellow men and women) as badly as we want. The illustrations are stark and impactful.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A starkly beautiful offering from Coe, who so often uses her artistic gifts to explore the darkest aspects of human nature. In this book, a pit bull recounts her hapless life moving from one harsh situation to another. Merritt Clifton of "Animal People News" has estimated that the average American pit bull's lifespan lasts only eighteen months. Sadly, many real life pit bulls' lives may be just as tragic and abbreviated as this fictional dog's.

[Bobby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pit's Letter is a powerful little book though, despite its heavy dependence on text, it is not as powerful as the newer The Animals' Vegan Manifesto. The illustrations do a lot of the talking in Pit's Letter but are not as effective at telling the story by themselves as the newer book which relies almost exclusively on illustrations to get the message across. That said, Pit's letter still packs quite a wallop and is worth picking up for anyone not adverse to being exposed to the dark reality that is what humans subject so many other species to, even our so-called "best friends." Coe manages, with a completely different approach than in The Animals' Vegan Manifesto, to create a book worth paying attention to.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart, heart breaking but beautiful and compelling. A very small book, can be read in an hour.