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What does one Philly pit bull say to another when they meet in a dog shelter?
“Go Birds!”
Midnight, a black pit bull found tethered to a street pole in 2019, is the real-life subject of the graphic novel “Midnight ‘Don’t Judge Me’ Ruiz,” by Susan Russell and Anne Koszalka. It follows his journey from stray to high-risk shelter dog to adopted pet on a horse ranch in Florida.
The story is told in first-person from the perspective of the dog.
“I was existin,’ but not what you calls livin,’” Midnight says in the book. “I was, like, wanderin’ around on the outside of life, knockin’ on the door.”
Russell wrote this underdog story in the vein of “Rocky,” giving Midnight a Philly accent and demeanor.
“Dogs are very smart. They love the Eagles. They love cheesesteaks and hoagies,” said Russell, a transplant to Philadelphia from Canada by way of Chicago.
“I really love Philly,” she said. “This book embodies a lot of the good things about Philly.”
Russell met Midnight during her brief tenure as director of the Philadelphia Animal Care and Control Team (ACCT) shelter from 2018-2019. It was there that she also met her future collaborator, Koszalka, a ceramic artist who was regularly volunteering at ACCT.
Midnight was adopted out to a family but was quickly returned when he nipped his new owner while guarding a toy.
That bite was minor, but it drew blood. When he came back to ACCT, Midnight was listed as a problematic dog.
“He was time stamped,” Koszalka recalled. “Which means he was going to be euthanized if he wasn’t adopted.”
To illustrate this story of redemption, Koszalka leaned on what she does best: ceramics. Each panel in the 120-page novel is a clay tile, hand painted, glazed, and fired, then photographed for the book.
Each tile was shaped to fit into a comic-book layout and designed to evoke the emotion of each moment in the story. It was a laborious three-year process to craft more than 400 unique tiles that together tell a story. The clay gives the images a patina that would be difficult or impossible to draw on paper.
“I’ve been doing clay for 30 years. I know these materials,” Koszalka said. “I know how to use clay this way. I don’t know how to use paper that way.”
“They embody the grit of Philly,” Russell said.
Midnight was among the 300 to 400 dogs surrendered to ACCT every month. In August 2024, a staggering 454 dogs were dropped off. Last July, 30 dogs arrived in a single day.
ACCT suffers constantly from overcrowding. It typically adopts out about 200 dogs a month, and euthanizes between 60 to 80 dogs a month.
“When you’re in a big city, you see a dog with particular features that comes into the shelter, everyone labels these blocky headed, beautifully cheekboned dogs pit bulls,” Russell said. “And automatically a stigma attaches. These dogs tend to sit in shelters for long periods of time, despite whether they have a good personality.”
Another strike against Midnight: people looking to adopt a dog tend to overlook black dogs due to a false perception of aggression, a phenomenon known as Black Dog Syndrome.
But Midnight stood out to Koszalka and another volunteer, Maria Termini-Romano.
“Sometimes dogs come in there and you’re drawn to a specific dog, for whatever reason,” she said. “We were dedicated to get this dog out of here.”
Sometimes, a dog gets lucky.
High-end fashion photographer Mike Ruiz visited ACCT Philly to photograph shelter dogs and advocate for their adoption. He took a picture of Midnight.
That photograph was featured in a comedy show in New York City staged by Stand Up For Pits, a California-based organization advocating for pit bull adoption.
In the audience that night was Susan Kessler, who looked at Midnight’s face and immediately thought, “home.”
“I’ve always had a soft spot for dogs with big heads, and I’m particularly partial to black dogs with white trim,” Kessler said. “I just gravitated towards Midnight.”
By that time, Koszalka and Termini-Romano had taken Midnight under their wing at the ACCT shelter, taking turns visiting and training him daily. He was ready for a visit by Kessler, who almost immediately adopted him.
Now 10 years old, Midnight splits his time between an apartment in New York City and Florida, where Kessler keeps and trains horses for dressage competition. The dog was wary of horses at first, but Kessler said he warmed up to them quickly.
Midnight also got along famously with Kessler’s father, Bernie, who was in hospice care. They formed a tight bond that lasted until Bernie died three years later.
“There was a lot of disclosure — at the time I was overseeing my dad’s care — to make sure that I wasn’t biting off more than I could chew,” Kessler said. “Turns out, Midnight was the easiest dog I’ve ever adopted. He does have some behavioral challenges, but they are easily managed. Kudos to Maria and Anne, who worked tirelessly with him while he was at the shelter.”
Kessler gave Midnight a longer name, “Don’t Judge Me” Ruiz, after the photographer whose photo brought the dog to Kessler’s attention.
“Lookin’ back, I don’t know why things goes the way they goes,” Midnight says in the graphic novel. “They says, ‘You was real lucky.’ Maybe cuz when somethin’ really good happens after all the bad stuff happens, there’s gotta be a reason for that. But I dunno.”
“I tried to tell it in a very unsentimental way because I think animals are very resilient in many ways. I don’t think they feel sorry for themselves,” Russell said. “They have to deal with all of these stressors that come at them, and they all deal with them in different ways.”
Russell and Koszalka will launch “Midnight ‘Don’t Judge Me’ Ruiz” on Jan. 26 at the booked. bookstore in Chestnut Hill, and at Barnes and Noble in Center City on Feb. 1.
Koszalka is still trying to figure out what to do with the 400 tiles she made to illustrate the book.
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