Dog people, please help : What breeds are the *Bliss* dogs?
This seems to be among the earliest color Bliss on GoComics:
Speech caption is “They grow up so fast.” [After-posting edit. See comments.]
Speech caption for the milking one is “They’re real.” [After-posting edit. See comments.]
Comics I Don't Understand 
There appear to be a couple of captions missing. If not, I don’t understand.
I am not sure what breed, but I have always thought the main dog looked like our toy poodle. But then again, we don’t have the groomer do any sort of froo-froo poodle cut.
One or two of the Bliss dogs looks a bit like they might be trying to be cockerpoos… floppy furry ears, for instance. But fur trimmed so you can see their eyes.
And yes, as Mark H. says, the Cow and Cloud cartoons have characters openly flapping their mouths but there are no pearls of wisdom in the caption section.
Mark H, yes it looks like that to me too; but I did not knowingly crop any of these.
These roughly biweekly retro collection postings come mostly from me reviewing old aux hdd storage and posting a few before deleting. But they were saved in the first place just because they struck me as amusing to look back on, or for posting to platforms like Yik Yak and Spout where I was briefly active. (Or once in a while as a commenter at CIDU.) Anyhow, it was just a matter of chuckling, pressing a finger, and selecting Save, with no editing steps.
The caption for the strip with the cloud background is “They grow up so fast.” For the one with the cow, “They’re real.”
But wait! The Clouds one was an exception to that account, and was the result of some very recent light “research” at GoComics or the like — and definitely looks like a screen grab rather than image file save, so in that case I could have sloppily left off captions. I’ll check when I get to a real computer later. Thanks for alerting on the issue!
Edited to add — Thanks to Usual John for tracking down and posting those missing captions!
Here’s the captioned image for the “clouds” panel:
P.S. The one with the cow is © 2000, which predates the GoComics archive.
P.P.S. Sorry, I misread that fuzzy copyright line, the correct date is Sat-14-Mar-2009:
The original dog’s name is (or was) “Penny”, she was a mini-poodle. Here’s an excerpt from this article:
“… [Steve] Martin joins Bliss and his dog, Penny …. mini-poodle …. standing over a table holding a knife, about to fillet the day’s catch. Martin encouraged Bliss to include the dog, who died last year.“
Martin encouraged Bliss to include the dog, who died last year.
Wait, who died last year? Bliss, Martin, or the (fictional) dog? Or was the dog real that Martin was encouraging Bliss to add, and s/he died?
@ larK – It was Harry Bliss’ real dog (Penny) who died, not the dog in the comic. It appears that she was the model for the dog in his comics.
P.S. Since the article was published last December, Penny probably died in 2021.
P.P.S. There’s also a picture of Harry & Penny near the end of the article, but since it also shows someone else, I’m not going to embed it here.
I was trying to look up whether Kelly Reichardt’s dog Lucy was still around, and got lost into this long appreciative study of her filmmaking.
(Lucy was a supporting player in OLD JOY, and co-star with Michelle Williams in WENDY AND LUCY.)
https://indiefilmhustle.com/ultimate-guide-to-kelly-reichardt-and-her-directing-techniques/
Here is today’s Bliss panel.
Are they trying to do the split-a-wishbone tradition? But where would they experience that? — they’re not supposed to get poultry bones. Or is it just the tradition of dogs-like-bones, and they’ve gone for something big!
Btw, yes I edited the already-published post – to include in-place some notes for those missing speech captions that our expert commenters had provided. But the post-posting notes do say that’s what they are; and hypothetical future readers need not be puzzled by the comments about missing captions.
Breaking Cat News cartoonist Georgia Dunn has stated that, in spite of real-life events, no “members of the crew” will be passing on. To date, Lupin and Tommy have died, and apparently young intern Beatrix was based on a previous cat that died at about that age. Basically the age of the characters have reached a stable point.
@ Mitch – The giant size of that wishbone made me think that those dogs may be dreaming of some aviosaur predecessor of modern chickens, but Bliss comics aren’t usually that intricate, so I think the “real” answer must be something else.
P.S. @ Mitch – The second (“cow”) caption that you interpolated landed one panel too deep; it needs to go above the cat, rather than below it.
I was aware of the ideal placement, but it was impractical for technical reasons. That group of images are locked in a frame, and don’t have spaces between them that could be expanded and accept some text.
It didn’t seem worth it to delete the filled Stacked Gallery block and separately track down and re-enter the images. So the added note specifies “for the milking cartoon” , while the not for the big cloud panel doesn’t need that as adjacency suffices in that case.
My podcast listening backlog this week reached a four-part series (which they try to call “a four-part fascination”) from the revamped “Science Quickly” podcast (from flailing Scientific American magazine) on fossil evidence of some extinct “monster birds”. At roughly the same time I saw this cartoon, and thought this could be a proto-avian monster wishbone.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/these-predators-had-a-face-like-an-axe-and-will-haunt-your-nightmares/
“This is Episode One of a four-part Fascination on really big birds.”
” Terror birds were the grizzly bears of birds, the great white sharks of the land, Jack the Ripper but with feathers. They were also truly fascinating. ”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/this-massive-scientific-discovery-sat-hidden-in-a-museum-drawer-for-decades1/
Targuman – I have always been afraid of animals – especially dogs. So, of course my sister love animals. While in high school I went on retreat with my religious education class for a weekend. When I returned home my sister and parents had adopted a dog from the shelter.
The dog was a poodle without a poodle cut – so it just looked like a furry mutt. We would not even have known it was a poodle if had not been told by the vet they took him to.
(After he passed away some long time later my sister showed with an wolf-like dog she found on the street to replace him – mom did not let that one stay.)
And Thatababy seemingly has also been interested in this “monster bird” topic!