Have fun with bodily functions in these deftly delineated comics by this year's Ignatz winner for Outstanding Mini-Comic, Lisa Hanawalt.

Summer officially begins now, with the release of Lisa Hanawalt's Hot Dog Taste Test!  This flexi-like hardcover volume delivers 180 pages of Ms. Hanawalt's full color comics mayhem.  Nothing is spared:  shopping, cooking, eating, farting -- it's all here!  Along with birds, corporate iconography, horses, picnics, travel and more.  In addition to comics, there are reproductions of sculptures, photographs, watercolors and hybrid combintations of all of the above.  It's a crazy hodgepodge of energetic, sillly and highly satiric humor.  

It appears that the new Lisa Hanawalt is a  > gasp! < graphic novel.  This 156 page full color hardcover just showed up, so we can't say more than confirm that it is drawn in the clean-black-line-with-lush-watercolor-fill style that Hanawalt fans will immediately recognize.

Here's the official party line:

"Coyote is a dreamer and a drama queen, brazen and brave, faithful yet fiercely independent. She beats her own drum and sews her own crop tops. A gifted equestrian, she’s half dog, half coyote, and all power. Together with her trusty steed Red, there’s not much that’s too big for her to bite off, chew up, and spit out right into your face, if you deserve it. But when Coyote and Red find themselves on the run from a trio of vengeful bad dogs, get clobbered by arrows, and are tragically separated, our protagonist is left fighting for her life, and longing for her displaced best friend. Taken in by a wolf clan, Coyote may be wounded, but it’s not long before she’s back on the open road to track down Red and tackle the dogs who wronged her.

Lisa Hanawalt’s homage to and lampoon of westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Coyote Doggirl is a self-aware, playful subversion of tropes. As our fallible hero attempts to understand the culture of the wolves, we see a journey in understanding and misunderstanding, adopting and co-opting. Uncomfortable at times but nonetheless rewarding andempowering, the story of these flawed, anthropomorphized characters is nothing if not relentlessly hilarious and heartbreakingly human. Told in Hanawalt’s technicolor absurdist style, Coyote Doggirl is not just a send-up of the western genre, but a deeply personal story told by an enormously talented cartoonist."