Drabble by Kevin Fagan for November 29, 2023

The one with the cone head?

I’ll just assume that’s what Wally imagines the vet’s office looks like. Otherwise, that’s one specific breed to model your building after.

Looks like they live in Logopolis.

I like how the businesses are shaped like what they sell.

Ralph’s hometown has the most interesting architecture in all of comics.

My Feisty gets nervous as soon as we get the pet carrier. And even worse when we try to put her in it. Not only because she fears going to the vet, she hates having to go anywhere. If I could make the vet do housecalls, she would be so much happier.

Any shakier and Wally could start his own mini-quake!

If the building was facing the other way it could be licking the cone

There’s two vets in our neighborhood. One building has large animal drawings on it, the other is in a strip mall. Being focused on the animals makes the later vet is much, much better.

Our vet’s building is definitely more nondescript but my dachshund seems to recognize it too! Starts shaking just like Wally poor little guy

Dogs do learn to recognize landmarks. One of ours would get excited when we were a block away from the bank because she knew she’d get a doggie treat from the drive through teller.

My dog recognizes the logo of a certain major pet store chain (the one with a bouncing ball in the logo) any time we are driving and pass one of those stores she gets excited because she knows that the clerks all have t-r-e-a-t-s at the cash registers

My dog would get a sad look on her face when we got close to the vet. I think she could tell by the smells where she was.

Ok, just saying, I don’t want to see the gastroenterology clinic.

Was the building designed after Wally? Or all dogs look alike under the pen of this cartoonist?

My cat, MacDuff, loved to travel: put out the carrier and he’d scamper right in, content to see where we’d drive to. The SECOND I’d open the door to the vet’s, he’d start to growl (NEVER did that ANYWHERE else) and his pupils’d dilate as he went into a fugue state – must’ve been the smell of disinfectant. Anyway, all four pounds of happy, playful cat, turned into the Tasmanian Devil possessed by Satan.

One time, I was told to pick him up the next day after a procedure, but got a phone call JSUT before closing: “You can pick up your cat , now… He’s recovered…” Turns out that he’d come to, backed up into his cell, then launched himself at the first person to walk by, a teenage volunteer. He grabbed her hair and had her screaming and crying…

The vet began to swaddle him in a beach towel at visits, until he ripped it and erupted like the Alien out of John Hurt’s midsection! Once, I had just dropped him off for a procedure (poor guy had to get enemas), when his previous teenage victim came out running, yelling my name. “He’s escaped and running over the dog kennel! Can you come and call him..?” “Well, he’s deaf, but I’ll try, but if his pupils are dilated, he won’t recognize me.” He was literally taunting the dogs. To this day, 30 years later, that vet STILL has a fish net they bought to capture him that day…

When we’d leave, he’d settle RIGHT down as we walked out of those doors, with NO ill will towards me, at all…

Wally’s personalized Vet, or should I say dogalized Vet.

Somehow our dogs always knew that too…even blocks away, you could see they were getting nervous…and once we pulled into the parking lot, forget it!!

Programmatic architecture is not good for everything.

Those buildings might fit in nicely in the Batman stories of the 1950s, where gigantic advertising props were all the rage in Gotham City (apparently the brainchild of one particular advertising agency, as I understand the backstory).

I wish we had those building codes in my town