2 out of 5

I’m super glad this reappeared as some short bits in the new Dark Horse Presents line, because Dog is one of those books that seems to just burst with a good concept that never quite arrives, and the DHP version seemed to allow creator Melo to sidestep the plotting that slows down this graphic novel and just get right to the gags.

The pitch isn’t exactly the newest idea on the block but it’s still a fun one – that monsters and such are real, and that there are people whose job it is – Dog, in this case – to keep said monsters in line.  Our leash to reality is via PizzaBoy – Eurico – who can’t catch a break at work (delivering pizzas…), especially when his delivery scooter is stolen by what look like gargoyles.  Since the police are forever unbelieving, a nerdy friend of Pizzaboy’s points him to Occult Investigator Dog, and maybe on the way to tracking down said scooter we run into mutant Nazis who are kidnapping children for reasons unknown.

There are two big problems that keep this script from scoring –

1. Pacing / the length of the story, and 2. The layout / artwork.

DH rocks for reprinting this in English, and the 5″ x 7″ mini-trade is cute (though maybe over-priced at 12.99), and the binding and colors are totally up to snuff, but at 100 pages, Melo takes way too long to dig into business (about 60 pages) but equally drops the dime on “monsters is real!” way too close to Pizzaboy’s having been exposed to them for the first time.  There’s some excellent extra material about how much work and time went in to bringing this project to light, and the lead-in to Dog – though still not quite as funny or as punchy as it wants to be – feels more loving and cultural than what follows, making me wonder if there wasn’t some labor of love at the start which turned into a rush for a deadline toward the end.  Regardless, if the middle and end of the story had been fleshed out to build up to the creepers a bit more effectively (and to Dog… there’s the sense that we’re supposed to be sort of mystified by him, but we do the revolving-chair-reveal bit and then suddenly Dog and PB are buds, tossing out nicknames and insults ’cause that’s what we all do when we enter into business ventures with strangers.), the story might’ve created more of a stir.

Along these same lines of almost being right is Juan Cavia’s artwork.  I can’t bring to mind the exact comparison, but Cavia’s figures have a great cartoonish look to them that allows for expressiveness and impossible contortions of facial features while maintaining a level of formalism in his figures that makes it acceptable when he drapes his backgrounds in some beautiful Portugese (?) architecture.  But his comic timing is waaay off, choosing the wrong panels to punctuate Melo’s puns, and action sequences are poorly rendered, choosing the wrong moment before or after the actual act to show us to allow for easy between-panel connections to happen in our brains.  Santiago Villa’s colors also drape everything in blended, warm and gloomy shades, which just do not allow that expressiveness to really translate well.

So it sounds good, and page flipping has some indications of a good story, but it definitely reeks of first attempt when actually plopping down to read it.  But again, it’s excellent that Mike Richardson and Dark Horse recognized the potential of the humor and the concept, because once the explanations are set aside and Melo could just focus on pacing his jokes, Dog and PB can drum up some greatly amusing stories.