Cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt heads west — to the Wild West, actually — for her next graphic novel. Drawn & Quarterly has announced they will publish Coyote Doggirl, the new graphic novel from the creator of My Dumb Dirty Eyes and Hot Dog Taste Test, in the fall of 2018.
“Lisa is enormously talented at creating fantastical worlds that are gorgeously technicolored and rendered, and she has a very funny gift for the anthropomorphically absurd,” said D + Q publisher Peggy Burns. “Once you look a bit closer however, you can see Coyote Doggirl is not just a send-up of the Western genre, but a deeply personal story for Lisa. Watching it unfold across the desert landscape is thrilling.”
Here’s how the publisher describes what will be Hanawalt’s first full-length graphic novel:
Coyote Doggirl is Hanawalt’s homage to and lampoon of Westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, featuring a fiercely independent female protagonist who sews her own crop tops and has no patience for etiquette. A gifted equestrian, Coyote Doggirl is half dog, half coyote, and a whole lot of attitude. She and her steed Red are on the run from a trio of vengeful bad guys when Coyote gets clobbered by a few well-placed arrows. Her attackers, a clan of wolves, take her in and nurse her back to health so she can get back on the road, track down Red, and evade the men who are hunting her. By turns delightfully absurd and intensely emotional, Coyote Doggirl charts one weird woman’s escape into the wild.
You can find chapter one on her website.