From the award-winning syndicated comic strip Mutts, the long-awaited “Guard Dog” story is now collected and presented in full color along with supplementary material, timed for the 30th anniversary
Guard Dog made his debut in the Mutts comic strip in 1995 and quickly became one of the strip’s most beloved characters. As a chained dog longing for freedom, he’s played an important role in raising awareness about the cruelty of tethering and has inspired countless Mutts readers to become involved in animal welfare.
In October 2023, nearly three decades after his debut, Guard Dog’s freedom story began to unfold in newspapers and online. After being abandoned by his owner, left alone and suffering, Guard Dog was discovered by his animal friends Mooch and Earl, and ultimately rescued by Doozy, a kindly neighborhood girl, and Ozzie, Earl’s guardian. After years of visiting Guard Dog to provide him with comfort and support, Doozy adopted him—marking the end of a long life of neglect and the beginning of one filled with love and safety.
The story line concludes with Guard Dog not only getting a new home but also a new name—Sparky—a nod to Patrick McDonnell’s greatest artistic inspiration, Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts.
As Guard Dog found his happy ending, McDonnell received requests from readers all over the world, many of whom had been invested in Guard Dog’s plight for decades, hoping that the long-anticipated story would be made into a book. This collected volume answers the demands of those passionate readers.
Brought to life with Patrick McDonnell’s warm and intimate art, and featuring the complete story, now in color for the first time, Breaking the Chain is an emotionally resonant vignette whose grounding in the real-life animal neglect issues that affect millions of chained dogs worldwide will move both long-time Mutts fans and first-time readers.
Praise
“In his heart-rending Guard Dog story, Patrick McDonnell proves once again that he is the kindest, most passionate cartoonist on record. In Breaking the Chain, McDonnell kindly and gently breaks the reader’s heart over and over again, and does so with such gentleness and grace that the reader, by the end, is in a state of elevated bliss. Not since Little Nemo in Slumberland has the comics page been gifted with such a gentle, reverential spirit. I don’t envy my friend Patrick having to deal with the fury of his fellow cartoonists, who haven’t realized that plain, simple humanity works on the comics page.”
—Jules Feiffer
“To me, Mutts is much more than a comic strip. It’s an expression of the best parts of life—a mirror that reflects our love for the people and animals we share it with.”
—Rob Thomas (award-winning singer/songwriter) and co-founder with Marisol Thomas of Sidewalk Angels Foundation, from their introduction
