Dogs

Dogs have a small but strikingly connective presence in the novel: they appear as companions in a vanished domestic world, as animals encountered by the Travelling Symphony, and as figures carried into the imagined landscape of Dr. Eleven. Their recurrence does not make them allegorical in any single, fixed way. Instead, particular dogs—with distinct appearances, habits, and relationships to people—link otherwise separated lives and periods of time.

Appearance and Recurrence

In the first issue of the comic, Dr. Eleven stands on dark rocks above an indigo sea at twilight. Boats move between islands, wind turbines turn on the horizon, and a small white animal stands beside him. Older members of the Travelling Symphony identify it as a dog, though it looks unlike any dog Kirsten has seen: a creature like a cross between a fox and a cloud. Its name is Luli. The image gives the animal a place in Dr. Eleven’s strange, carefully rendered world, rather than presenting it as a generic background detail.

The dog’s appearance is bound to the scene’s larger composition. Dr. Eleven holds his fedora while looking over the sea; Luli stands at his side, also facing the landscape. The accompanying line describes a damaged home and the sweetness of life on Earth. The dog is not given a speech or an independent account of the world, but its placement beside Dr. Eleven makes companionship part of the image of exile. It stands with him in a setting defined by distance from ordinary life.

Dogs also appear amid the remains of ordinary public life. At the Travelling Symphony’s performance in St. Deborah by the Water, a wolfish grey dog lies on its side at the end of the front row, tongue hanging out. The audience has dwindled to no more than thirty people, gathered in two grim-faced rows on the grit of a former parking lot. The dog is one concrete presence in that uneasy gathering; the passage does not explain who owns it or what it makes of the performance.

Luli Before the Collapse

Before the collapse, Luli is the Pomeranian in the Hollywood Hills home shared by Miranda and Arthur. Photographers follow the couple in the street, and Arthur’s name appears above the titles of his movies; against this encroaching celebrity, the dog remains a familiar presence in their household. At night, Miranda calls for Luli, whose pale shape shows at the end of the yard. The description makes a domestic animal visible in darkness, amid the quiet streets and garden shadows Miranda prefers.

At a dinner party, Luli watches the guests from the sunroom, where she has been sent after begging for scraps. Each time Miranda looks up from the table, she sees the dog peering through the glass French doors. The scene places Luli just outside the gathering: close enough to watch it, but separated from the table and its company. The dog’s begging and banishment are modest household details, distinct from the fame and public attention surrounding Arthur and Miranda.

Later, while guests remain at the party, Luli wanders near Miranda and Clark in the grass. Miranda is smoking in the dark; Clark eventually returns inside, explaining to someone that she is looking for the dog and expects to come in. Luli’s movement through the garden gives Miranda a reason to leave the room and creates a brief interval apart from the party. The dog is not only an object of affection kept indoors; she also moves through the night landscape that Miranda finds more appealing than the crowded gathering.

From Companion to Comic Image

Miranda recognizes that Dr. Eleven has a Pomeranian and finds the detail immediately plausible: without a dog, she thinks, the lonely character would be lonelier still. In her study, she sketches Dr. Eleven on a rocky outcropping, fedora pulled low as he scans the sea, with a small white dog beside him. Only partway through drawing does she realize that she has made the dog a clone of Luli. The two animals occupy different worlds, but the image of one has entered the other through Miranda’s act of drawing.

The scene sets the drawing table beside the living animal. As Miranda’s invented Luli looks toward the sea, the real Luli sleeps on a pillow at her feet, twitching in a dog dream. The contrast is precise: one dog is fixed in a picture, windswept beside a solitary figure, while the other is close enough to touch and absorbed in sleep. The comic’s distant sea and the household’s immediate intimacy meet in the likeness Miranda makes, without erasing the difference between an image and an animal.

Dogs in the Post-Collapse World

At St. Deborah, the Prophet calls Luli over his shoulder, and the dog trots after him. The passage connects the named dog to the Prophet as he leaves with a man who had guarded the gas station. As the audience disperses, the Symphony is left alone in the parking lot; no one stays to speak with its members after the performance, and the Conductor orders the horses harnessed. The dog’s movement belongs to this departure, while the abandoned performance space and the crowd’s dispersal mark a change in the Symphony’s welcome. The text does not explain the dog’s history or make its presence the cause of that change.

Taken together, the dogs link distinct forms of proximity: Luli begs near a dinner table, sleeps at Miranda’s feet, and reappears as a drawn companion beside Dr. Eleven; another named Luli follows the Prophet away from the gathering, while the grey dog remains among the seated audience. These appearances preserve animals as particular presences, not just scenery. Their recurrence also gives the novel a quiet means of carrying an image across its divided timelines: a small white dog beside a person, whether at home or at the edge of an imagined sea.