Jetzin Brothers Studios is proud to officially announce its second graphic novel series – The Moscow Mongrel – written and illustrated by the studio’s founder – Jade A. Jetzin.
The Moscow Mongrel follows the adventures of the wandering hobo mutt himself, Karl, and his alluring yet secretive love interest Natasha Barkanov.
The first beginnings of the idea that would become The Moscow Mongrel came to Jade when he first discovered the real life story of the famous Russian stray dog of Moscow named Malchik. Malchik lived in the underground metros of Moscow during the 1990s and became a beloved fixture of commuters’ daily lives as he would wonder about scavenging scraps of food.
This led to Jade learning more about the unknown and unstudied society of stray dogs and their secret worlds. He heard first and second hand accounts of how some strays had complex ways of traveling – as well as finding food. Some would board the metro in the morning and travel into the inner city to scavenge during the day before catching the same train in the evenings to return to the safety of the outskirts. There were even observed cases of packs sending the smallest and cutest dogs out to beg for food from humans, which it would then bring back to the others.
Jade decided that such a world would be the perfect setting for a cartoon style graphic novel series – he decided to call it Moscow Mongrels.
“I wanted to make a book that would be at home on the same shelf as my favorite childhood dog related animated movies. Such as Balto, Lady And The Tramp, 101 Dalmations, and All Dogs Go To Heaven. As always, I try to make stories that I would have loved as a kid.”
The name of “The Moscow Mongrel” came from the wordage used on a Russia Today documentary discussing strays where the hosts referred to the dogs as mongrels. This led to the first title for the series “Moscow Mongrels”, which later changed to THE Mascow Mongrel. This was chosen partially because of the fun word play and partially because of its classic sounding nature and rhyming convention.
At the beginning of writing Jade expected to be flooded with ideas for the series from watching documentaries on strays and characterizing them with heavy doses of cartoon dog sensibilities. After intensive research he found that there was basically no official documentation about the lifestyle of stray dogs. The handful of accounts and a random smattering of short videos on the internet were the only glimpse into stray society. Some of these videos showed such odd and fantastic behavior that Jade often wondered why there wasn’t a camera crew out trying to find out more about these animals.
It was this lack of real life inspiration that made Jade dig up a much older and a far more bare bones idea about some sort of story of street life – he referenced the mood of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album. The feeling of that youthful energy of “…you either win tonight, kid, or you die trying” or “…you can live the rest of your life as a good for nothin’ drunken bum.” Each one of these songs painted a picture of the epic struggles of the dreamers and the hustlers tinged with a sense of old school nostalgia. This kind of world paired perfectly with that of the stray dogs.
The setting for the story was originally based in a more contemporary Moscow, focusing on city dog street life. But, as he so often does, Jade soon found himself more intrigued by the countryside and far older history. Russia is a vast and unique country filled with cultures and peoples that many in the west would find completely alien, especially the further east you go.
Inspired visually by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s colored photos that captured the old Russian Empire in the early 1900s, and literarily by the works from Leo Tolstoy, “The Cossacks” and “War And Peace“, as well as the thrilling history of the early Siberian conquest by Yarmock Tenavich.
However, after months of reading, study, and research Jade was faced by a small dilemma.
“I became thrilled by all these great eras in Russian history so I couldn’t pick just one for the story to take place in. So I combined them all into a sort of fairy tale ‘time out of time’ setting and began drawing inspiration from all of them at once.”
Now all this has come together to create the world of The Moscow Mongrel – a story that promises much adventure for our stray dogs on the edge of the Russian Siberian frontier…
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