Preparing to Bite
Cartoonist: Keiler Roberts
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
Publication Date: May 2025
Keiler Roberts’ new book, Preparing to Bite, might be the most relatable comic you’ll read this year, especially if you’re in or near middle age. And especially especially if you have art playing any kind of significant role in your life. And especially especially ESPECIALLY if you’ve ever had a puppy. I could maybe keep going with this especially construct paired with the granular story ingredients that make up this graphic novel-told-in-one-page-comics, but the larger point here is just that Roberts book is so specific about her own life, that I couldn’t help but see my own daily struggles reflected back at me to some extent as I read it.
And, perhaps most notably, reflected back at me with a dry and subtle sense of humor drawn from the inherent absurdities of my own every day life. There’s one page in particular that had me laughing every now and again for days. Forgive me, I don’t have it as part of the preview material here, but this page is a four-panel page (the comics in this book are most frequently either one panel or four panels). On it, the protagonist’s new dog, Pepsi, is scolded for blowing bubbles in water and making a soppy mess. Cut to the freshly-scolded dog, still dripping, licking at an electrical outlet. Cut to the protagonist just staring into space, like, what do I even do here.
As the owner of an obstinate and self-jeopardizing dog myself, I laughed at this and I laughed hard. And I bring it up within this review because it’s both my favorite page in the book and also representative of other funny pages within. Indeed, in Preparing to Bite, Roberts mines humor from relentlessly ordinary life activities like scolding a dog. Others range from a quick chat with her partner to shopping for a bathing suit with her child to going for a walk with a friend to the absurd things that dogs and humans watch each other do every single day (that’s part of the dog-human co-habituating accords, after all).
I also thought the structure of the book served the reading experience rather well. As I noted above, Preparing to Bite isn’t the sort of more typical graphic novel, where story beats cohere together from page to page. Every page in this book is its own comic with its own micro story. As you read on, however, you start to pick up on characters and themes and, to some extent, the cadences of our protagonist’s life. Time also passes in this way, as — without much belaboring from the storyteller — an elderly dog no longer appears, and a much younger pup begins living with the family solo.
It could be, of course, that this is just the structure within which Roberts is most comfortable making comics. But I took more from it. It felt to me like the way we recall long stretches of our own lives. It’s pretty rare in my experience to remember any large chunk of time as a coherent story with building action and a payoff. It’s much more familiar to me for life to be recalled as it is here, in funny or sad or representative bits, almost like the anecdotes we might share with a friend who asked how our week went.
In this way, Preparing to Bite reads like the hilarious comics diary of a person who is honest and unflinching about the way they live their life. About the times the silly dog puts their wet face against the power socket, admitting that in response all they could do was stare. It’s a wonderful book to savor and read lazily. I read it over the course of two or three nights before bed, like a palate cleanser for my day, and that felt exactly right to me. If you’re looking for a major emotional narrative crescendo, it’s not going to come in Preparing to Bite, at least not at any one point you’ll see on the page.
But you might still think about this book and what it had to say days later. You might randomly laugh at one or two of the jokes. You may even quote to a friend the line (above), “how many times have you quit comics now?” And that sort of memorability to me speaks very highly of a book that generates so many clever comics from the mundanity of everyday life.
Preparing to Bite is available now
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English (US) · 