Photo courtesy of Elissa Gershowitz.

On a rainy evening earlier this week, Roger Sutton and Harry Bliss packed the house at Harvard Book Store for a conversation about Bliss's book (for adults) You Can Never Die: A Graphic Memoir. The two first met "at Maurice's farm" in 2014 when Bliss was a Sendak Fellow.

You Can Never Die is Bliss's "reflections on life and his relationship with Penny, his beloved dog," a mainstay of his cartoons, who passed away. This was an animal-loving audience — a show of hands for: how many people talk to their pets? revealed: pretty much everyone — and Bliss even attempted the voice he uses as his dog (though: "I can't really do it without the dog in front of me").

The conversation also touched on Bliss's upbringing in Upstate New York with "a family of artists, a rowdy and turbulent bunch"; the fallibility and perceptions of memory; David Bowie's 1976 drug arrest in Rochester; living in J. D. Salinger's house; creating New Yorker cartoons and covers — and a Horn Book cover; collaborating with Steve Martin...and having to tell him something's not funny; being inspired by (among others) Schulz, Spiegelman, and Sendak, who also "really loved his dogs." Roger, too — here's Buster (RIP) and Brownie: