Dog & Pizzaboy

The book “The Adven­tures of Dog Men­donça and Piz­z­aboy” started out as a col­lab­o­ra­tion between Fil­ipe Melo, a por­tuguese musi­cian and writer, and Juan Cavia, an Argen­tin­ian set designer and artist.

Ini­tially, it was thought as a movie script. Fil­ipe Melo and Pablo Parés, an argen­tin­ian direc­tor and screen­writer, wrote a first draft of a script that even­tu­ally became the story for the first book. “it was a trib­ute to all the eight­ies movies that we loved — from Grem­lins to Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle China, and to the com­puter games that we played, like The Secret of Mon­key Island and Leisure Suit Larry” — says Melo.

The first book was done via Skype over a period of one year, gath­er­ing a small crew of Por­tuguese and Argen­tin­ian tal­ents — San­ti­ago Villa, a key fig­ure to the book, doing the col­ors, Mar­tin Tejada and João Pombeiro (“Pro­grama do Aleixo”) on the sequen­tial adap­ta­tion of the script, and Pedro Semedo on the lettering.

After brows­ing for pub­lish­ers, the book became a real­ity through Tinta-da-china, an inde­pen­dent pub­lisher based in Lis­bon, Por­tu­gal. The book became an imme­di­ate suc­cess, win­ning Best Screen­play at FIBDA awards and sell­ing enough copies to allow a sec­ond adventure.

In the mean­time, through John Lan­dis (the author of the fore­word for the first book), “Dog” Men­donça reached the hands of Mike Richard­son, the pres­i­dent of Dark Horse Comics, who con­tacted the crew to write four orig­i­nal episodes to be included in the com­pi­la­tion “Dark Horse Presents”, along­side artists like Frank Miller, Dave Gib­bons and Mike Mignola.

Mean­while, Melo and Cavia, along with the exact same col­lab­o­ra­tors of the first book, decided to start the sec­ond chap­ter of the tril­ogy of “Dog” Men­donça. This book took two years to com­plete and it fea­tures a fore­word by leg­endary film maker George A. Romero, the inven­tor of zom­bies and a major influ­ence on Melo And Cavia.

The books fol­low the adven­tures of a pizza deliv­ery boy, a mid­dle aged were­wolf detec­tive, a six thou­sand year old demon trapped inside a lit­tle girl´s body and the sev­ered head of a gar­goyle who are forced to save the world more often than they would like to.

“We are very proud of the work”, says Cavia, “but let´s see if it works with the read­ers. Maybe it´s just a piece of shit.”