'Buckles'.
David Gilbert is a US newspaper comic artist, best-known for his signature gag comic, 'Buckles' (1996-2021), about an anthropomorphic dog.
David Gilbert was born in 1971 and raised in Syracuse, New York. Growing up, he was fascinated by Disney animation, and comic strips like George Gately's 'Heathcliff', Berkeley Breathed's 'Bloom County', Bill Amend's 'FoxTrot', Bil Keane's 'The Family Circus' and Bill Watterson's 'Calvin & Hobbes'. Although he tried taking a cartooning class, his teacher told him he was so talentless that he would better quit, since he had "no future." While attending college, David wrote and drew a weekly comic strip for the Syracuse Herald-Journal, then got a job at a local animation company called Animotion, where he worked as an assistant animator.
Originally, Gilbert wanted to make a comic strip about a bird, whom he named Abercrombie was owned by a senior couple, who also had a pet dog, Scruffy. Jaye Kennedy of King Features felt the comedy was strong, but suggested turning the seniors into a younger couple and use the dog as the protagonist. After this reshuffling, Gilbert's comic debuted on 25 March 1996. At the time, the 24-year old Gilbert was the youngest US cartoonist to have a nationally syndicated newpaper comic. Titled 'Buckles', after the renamed dog, the comic centers on the naïve puppy, Buckles, owned by the young couple Paul and Jill Haggerson. Buckles has been described by Gilbert as basically a child in dog guise. This is why Jill treats their pet more like a child, while Paul thinks Buckles should be more obedient. Other side characters are Arden the bird, his feathered sidekick Jay the blue bird, Scrappy the squirrel (who serves as the series' antagonist) and a smart, nameless flea on Buckles' fur who communicates with him, but is otherwise an invisible character. The series was distributed by King Features to about 100 newspapers and collected in three books by Plan Publishing: 'Buckles Unleashed' (2002), 'There's A Street Dog In All of Us!' (2003) and 'A Good Vacuum Is A Dead Vacuum' (2005). The series was quite popular, given the fact that in readers' polls about their favorite comics, it often ended first place. 'Buckles' concluded on 21 March 2021.
'Buckles'.