This article originally appeared onDen of Geek UK.
What other creature has such a long association with our history?
They can talk, or be geniuses, or form telepathic links.
They can have more than one head, or grow to an enormous size.
He was created by Norman Bridwell in 1963.
Sometimes the dog is normal, as is the child but the world they end up in is not.
Dorothy and Toto travel to Oz by mistake inThe Wonderful Wizard OfOz(1900).
They cling to each other in the strange world of witches, munchkins, and yellow brick roads.
There were fourteenOzbooks, written by L. Frank Baum and many more written by other authors.
Would adventures in Hogwarts be quite the same without Fang?
But the dog sidekick is not the only kind of tale (sorry) out there.
Its a fascinating book.
Kurt Vonnegut was certainly keen on it he once said that humanity is, …dumb as heck.
You dont even have to be a teacher.
Dogs and cats are smarter than we are.
He wrote a great short story about our stupidity calledTom Edisons Shaggy Dog(1953).
Intelligence can bring a whole host of new moral issues for the higher-thinking dog.
Its a hard task to be a good dog in the Discworld, but somehow he manages it.
Of course, its easy to love a dog character, stupid or intelligent.
There are even more bizarre dogs that are older still.
Greek mythology gave us Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the gates of the Underworld.
Heracles captured it as the final task in his twelve labours.
In modern terms, JK Rowling created Fluffy, the three-headed dog who guards the Philosophers Stone at Hogwarts.
Suitably enough, Fluffy was purchased by Hagrid from some Greek chappie he met at The Leaky Cauldron.
A literary dog that really should scare anyone isnt, in fact, a dog at all.
Its a robot, and it appears in Alan Moores brilliantThe Ballad Of Halo Jones(1984).
This leads to the kind of show-down that leaves both Halo Jones and the reader as nervous wrecks afterwards.
