Dogs was a regular digest size book designed for the earliest of readers and published by the Olympia School District. The connection was through my mother, Jeanette Willis, who was a teacher and sometimes administrator for OSD.
This was my first published work of the 1980s, printed in either January or February 1980. At the time I was working at Seattle Public Library as a low level clerk. In fact, my desk was way down in the basement, and that's literally low level.
Dogs was also the last of several books I drew for the Olympia School District, all of them constructed for beginning readers. I was given a list of words and letters thought to be the easiest for children to read, and then I used what they gave me to invent a story.
In 1980, this was my only solo book. My other nine published cartoons of that year were all in The Cooper Point Journal, campus newspaper for The Evergreen State College. The weird part about that-- I was no longer a student there. I had bequeathed a huge stack of unpublished comix to the CPJ when I left, and they spent a few years publishing more of my work after I graduated than when I was enrolled. Their August 7, 1980 issue was the first published appearance of "Mortie" the dog, but the panel was probably drawn in 1978.
Anyway, you can see how Odd Dog is a Morty prototype. Odd Dog first showed up in his own Olympia School District book in 1976.
