take me walkies to your leader

As I promised, another section from Best In Show. Perhaps this will surprise you - a bit about Keith Haring! I remember well how fresh and funny and wild Haring's art was in the very early 80's, and how there was a daring to his work, too. He was probably the first graffiti-derived artist to make it big, and yes, I know about Basquiat, but he never got the break he deserved.
Rosenblum (page 82) talks about Haring's dogs as iconic characters that stepped into fantasy:

In the 1980's, when Star Trek and Star Wars ruled imaginations young and
old, the short-lived Keith Haring, a victim of AIDS, invented the equivalent of
cartoonlike hieroglyphs from a remote civilization, archetypal images of humans
and animals in mythic adventures that, like an inspired gremlin, he spread far
beyond the confines of art museums, all the way to T-shirts and subway
stations. In his vast repertory of ideograms. . . dogs figure large. In
one of these images, made with a marker, indicative of his role as a graffiti
artist, an Earth dog barks not at the moon but at a UFO that may be planning an
abduction to outer space.

I couldn't find a way to send you to the image Rosenblum uses, but here's another dog/UFO matchup: Untitled (1982).

Don't you love that run-on sentence? Remember, Rosenblum is a professional. Don't try this at home!