Last week I posted a list of some of my favorite blogs, and one of them was Puppy Jones, a clever and fun blog and comic website that perfectly captures the quirky moments of a life lived with dogs.  Puppy Jones features the adventures of Starbuck (a.k.a. the metrosexual dog), Zuzu (daddy’s little girl, who is usually accompanied by “tb”, her tennis ball), and Hampton Monroe (the new kid on the block who’s “just trying to figure everything out”).

First launched in 2004, Puppy Jones is a collaboration by the husband and wife team, Dave and Grace, who create and draw all of the comics on their website.

From Grace:

Puppy Jones first launched in 2004. We were more of an online shop back then selling dog products along with a page with some of our comics. My husband Dave, aka “Daddy” and I decided to start a comic and drawing our dogs as a way of remembering our fur babies.  Knowing their life span isn’t as long as ours we wanted to capture their characters and the funny moments we’ve shared with them through something that would help to keep their spirit alive forever. And so we came up with the idea of a comic strip.

In 2008, Starbuck, our first beagle passed after a courageous fight with cancer. We were devastated by our loss and still feel his absence. But we were happy that we had started to tell his story through our comics and we can continue to to do so through Puppy Jones. In 2010 we re-launched our website to focus more on our drawings and our blogs – what we really wanted to do from the beginning.

As for the creative process, we both come up with ideas for comics. Sometimes we have brainstorming sessions and other times the comics are inspired by something that just happened that day.  I’ll draft up the comic first and then both of us review and revise the wording and some of the drawings. As a last step Dave cleans up the drawings (fonts, colors, etc). Dave and I both have full time jobs and we work on Puppy Jones in our off time. We would love for Puppy Jones to be our full-time job one day.  We are always really really flattered to hear when our comics have made someone laugh.

Puppy Jones certainly made me laugh!  I spent about half an hour reading through all of their archived comic strips.  Here’s another one that reminded me of a common scene at the local kiddie pool when I was growing up. . .