Housepets! is a long-running webcomic written and illustrated by furry artist Rick Griffin. It explores the lives and relationships of anthropomorphic animals, primarily dogs and cats, living as pets in an American suburb. The comic began with a focus on humor and slice of life stories, but eventually incorporated supernatural elements and magic to create longer, more complex story arcs. This first comes into play when human Joel Robinson is transformed into a dog and is forced to integrate into animal society. Through this character’s transformation, Griffin asserts that when people live in an environment where they do not have to worry about working to survive, they will become better people.
When the reader is introduced to Joel Robinson, he is bitter, isolated, and unfulfilled. Joel works with PETA in a job he has no passion for and which leads to his arrest after his coworker pressures him to abduct a dog to advance their employer’s cause. In his introduction, Joel is explicitly framed as a threat to the comic’s main characters, to the point where he is usually cast sinisterly in shadow. During the arc, the reader learns Joel is not enthusiastic about this work, and that PETA is one of the only organizations that will hire him. Though played for a joke, this speaks to the fact that a person’s need to be employed to make ends meet can lead them to work exploitative or unethical jobs. This results in those people having to rationalize the harm they do to others through their work.
While in jail, Joel is magically transformed into a dog by a demigod. He is renamed King and is expected to live his life as a dog, relinquishing all of his human responsibilities. This is difficult at first, but King is eventually able to carve out a fulfilling life through the relationships he forms with the other animals in the neighborhood. The cynicism that defined him as a human gradually disappears as he no longer has to perform harmful acts for the sake of meeting his needs. When he is put into a position where he does not have to worry about working to survive, his live and worldview improve. He can no longer justify any of the things he did in the past, so he lets go of the anger he used to protect himself and instead learns how to find strength through his relationships with others.
Like much of Rick Griffin’s work, Housepets! is a narrative that concerns itself with characters reconciling their past in order to have a brighter future. In the case of Joel, the expectation that he work an unethical job in order to maintain an unsatisfactory standard of living is something that he is forced to live with as a human. It is not until he transforms into King and is given the opportunity to live a life free from that expectation that he can become a better person.