Darkhorse’s Dead Dog’s Bite has no wacky monsters but there is a goofy narration gimmick that harkens to the old-school TV it is clearly inspired by, like a Scooby-Doo mystery for adults. A missing teen has the town on alert, but with a relatively lackluster effort at searching for her.
Dead Dog’s Bite opens in a sleepy town with a missing teen. Many have written off the protagonist’s friend as a runaway not worth searching for. But there is a hint of something off in the fictional town of Pendermills. Dead Dog’s Bite #1 by Tyler Boss has all the trappings of a Saturday morning Scooby-Doo cartoon, but with completely unique story mechanics. The comic begins with a man in a blue suit crawling out of a manhole and prefacing the story, saying that the comic's story is a factual account.
This bizarre and fascinating narrative mechanic starts the story, but its eccentricities don’t end there. The comic's framing is often equally unique. Panels vary from top-down views with the blue-suited narrator gazing up, to the normal mid-level shot of a character with close-up details, enveloped by a patterned background or onomatopoeia. Josephine (our bespectacled, millennial version of Velma) seems like the only one invested in finding her friend. The missing girl is a pretty young woman with the decidedly unattractive name of Cormac Guffin who has been missing for three days. The town held a rally, under the auspices of raising awareness and finding Mac, as she’s commonly known.
But Josephine suspects the town has written her friend off as dead. Very little is revealed in this first issue. The basic character motivations are there, but not much is dropped from the little threads of mystery surrounding this book. A motif of a spiral is seen throughout, hinting at a larger conspiracy. But beyond the imagery, not much is divulged. A missing poster, the local constable and the mayor all have spiral sigils.
Unlike a classic Scooby-Doo episode which usually wraps up in 15 minutes with a nice digestible ending, Dead Dog’s Bite is determined to let its mystery burn slowly. The mayor of Pendermills seems suspect, as does his wife who wore a black and white, spiral-designed, form-fitting suit to the rally. The clues are certainly there, but it’s too early to link them together in any meaningful way.
Josephine seems unaware of this blue-suited narrator that is always in the back of the car or standing beside her and announcing some parable or pontificating about the arc of the story. Mac’s boyfriend is as concerned as Josephine. But the pall of death hangs around her friend’s disappearance. Not to mention they are both reeling from Mac’s absence. Unlike Scooby-Doo, there’s no great unmasking of a villain at the conclusion but Pendermills sprawls out in front of Josephine with curving arms just like the spiral that’s haunted each page of Dead Dog's Bite.
