PIT'S LETTER by Sue Coe

Sue Coe
Pit's Letter

"Nothing in print beats Sue Coe's … illustration for graphic and moral impact … [w]hile giving her vision an entertainingly comical, over-the-top intensity." — New York Times

"… [S]he has an almost flawless command of pictorial composition as 'stage' and a riveting sense of action and dramatic illumination." — Washington Post

Sue Coe takes no prisoners and suffers no fools. From apartheid to American civil rights, from sweatshop labor to slaughterhouses, Coe has addressed complex issues of right and wrong in unsparing, unequivocal terms. Coe draws on a wealth of political artistic traditions, including George Grosz and Otto Dix, to render her conviction that capitalism cannibalizes everything in sight, and those who cooperate will suffer. But she has consciously modeled her latest tract on William Hogarth's allegorical series "The Four Stages of Cruelty."

In Pit's Letter, Coe's taken on the origins of evil and the nature of our collusion. On the surface, Pit's Letter is a simple tale of a dog, loved, lost, and ultimately murdered by the superior beings granted dominion over the earth. The eponymous canine Pit is loyal companion to her master Pat Watson, accompanying him in his childhood adventures. She has an inkling of doom when he excels at biology and dissection. After defending Pat from his abusive father, she is abandoned along a highway. She winds up on death row at an animal shelter, only to be rescued by a bio engineering lab, for research fodder. Her beloved master has himself become an experiment there, and she dies watching over his deathbed.

While vivisection is at the heart of the narrative, Coe's underlying concern is the slippery slope of cruelty and collusion. "For as long as people massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love." (Pythagoras)

Born in England and educated at the Royal College of Art in London, Sue Coe lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited her artwork worldwide, including a solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, and contributes illustrations regularly to The Nation, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Village Voice, among other publications. She is the author of four previous books, including Dead Meat, published by Four Walls Eight Windows.

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