Dog Man

Objects and characters throughout Dog Man have labels scrawled on them, including a bomb (labeled “bomb”), the chief’s police cap (labeled “Chief”), the mayor (who wears a shirt with a large “M” printed on it), the mayor’s car (labeled “Mayor”), a security guard’s desk (labeled “guard”), and a garbage bag (labeled “trash”).

Many buildings are also labeled. These include the chief’s house, “Petey’s Secret Lab,” the hospital, the police station (labeled “cops”), the chief’s office, “Cat Jail,” the robot factory (labeled “Robo-Time Industries”), and all the mayor’s “rotten businesses”—“Tim’s Burglar Supplies,” “Bully Supplies,” and “Illegal Stuff 4 Sale.”

Some of these labels, such as the ones on the bomb and the mayor’s car, apparently exist outside Dog Man’s diegesis. This implies that George and Harold included them for clarity. Other labels—like those proclaiming the names of businesses—exist in-universe as billboards and signs. However, they are stylistically indistinct from the clarifying labels. Like most of the text in Dog Man, both types of labels are clumsily scrawled in pencil, with little consideration of formatting and no visual depth.

Throughout Dog Man, sections of text are blacked out and crossed out, implying that George made mistakes while lettering. The individual panels are also shaky and uneven; there are lines, nicks, and protrusions in the gutters between panels.