Dark Horse has been releasing a few of the stories published in Dark Horse Presents as one-shot collections. The first one I read was Resident Alien, which set up a limited series. I had enjoyed the story in bits and pieces in its original format, but found it much more intriguing in its own comic.

Such was not the case with Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy. The constant stopping and restarting of the story is played as a gag, but it just left me a little motion sick.

Also, I’m not sure this is the best way to present an origin story. Especially one where unusual demons/werewolves are kidnapped by (yawn) Germans and experimented on.

Attention comic book writers: I understand that Germans were THE evil when comic books came to be. I understand that Nazis were horrible. But making the bad guys thin Germans with glasses and fedoras is the laziest convention in comics. If you’re going to make Germans the villains why not also use such avant garde techniques as sequencing flashbacks in Black and White, or ending the story with a reveal that IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

Ahem. It is certainly possible to make a good story with any of those aforementioned elements. You just have to have some draw to your characters of your plot that allows you to get away with using cliches. Melo hasn’t done that in this collection. I don’t know why I should care about this origin story, these characters aren’t doing anything except telling this origin. And they are definitely telling the story, not showing it.

There’s a few attempts to add quirky humor, such as inserting product placement in memories, but it’s not enough.

The art, on the other hand, is gorgeous. It’s almost like every panel was sketched out by Ben Templesmith (from 30 Days of Night), heavily edited by Edwin Huang (from Skullkickers), and then finished up by Bill Waterson (Calvin & Hobbes). I would love to see Cavia draw something interesting. (Santiago R. Villa does the colors, and I’d love to see him work on something else, too.) Actually, I think I’d enjoy seeing this entire book with different dialog. Very spare dialog.

I want to check out the graphic novel The Incredible Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizza Boy to see if it’s more interesting. At the very least, I’ll get a chance to gawk at the art. At best, I’ll find that this one issue suffers do to the confines of the story structure, and not the imagination of the creator.