D’s not trying to be a rock god. 

He’s just a lonely teenager with an active imagination playing songs to his lost love beyond the grave.  But when that music reaches farther than expected, he unknowingly becomes the anonymous Metal Legend known only as DOOMBOY!

DOOMBOY tells the story of an ordinary, lonely teenager with an active imagination and a love of metal music.  When his girlfriend passes away suddenly, he decides to broadcast songs to her beyond the grave, playing his heart out under the secret name “Doomboy”.  What he doesn’t realize, however, is that those broadcasts are picked up all across town… and beyond.  Soon the music of Doomboy becomes legendary, and his innocent private life quickly turns inside out.

The award-winning graphic novel by the internationally-renowned comic virtuoso TONY SANDOVAL!  Includes the original, unpublished 5-page short story from Tony’s sketchbook that inspired the full-length graphic novel!

The story of DOOMBOY resonates with some real emotional pathos, and really speaks to the teenaged audience (especially those who listen to Metal and Rock).  Did you draw any experience from your own youth into this story?

I’ve been playing with the idea since a long time ago, just like a local joke with some friends.  Doomboy was a lonely guy populating my sketchbooks for some years, until I decided to do the book.  It has some elements from my real life, I used to play in a band in the 90´s, and the characters look a bit like me and my brother attending the local gigs and stuff, but the story is totally fiction.

The setting for the story is very vague, and never specified.  Did you have a location in mind when creating the story? Or were you intentionally leaving it unclear, so that the reader can place it in their own location?

It is a fictional place, but with a lot of resemblance to my home town of Esperanza and Empalme in the northwest of Mexico.  I always liked the contrast of the desert against the sea.

Your style is incredibly unique – a fascinating combination of “cute” and “dark”.  What inspired your creative direction?

Ah!  Well many things — I have a lot of influences, but I can say I never tried to have an unique style, it just happened.  But I think the important ideas came after reading The Story of Mister Summer by Patrick Süskind.

Many of your stories deal with Death and dealing with loss, but in a way that is very cathartic and unexpectedly uplifting.  What brings you back to this topic and mood so often?

Well, I guess death when I was young  gave me a big impact, but above all a melancholic state, and this is the kind of stories I like — it is an atmosphere who is telling things are not going to be the same again.

You have traveled the world and lived in many different countries.  What do you find to be common in the types of comic book stories in each territory?  Are there universal elements you try to use, to make your stories universally appealing?

I think the passion of the authors and readers, and the fact that we love to spend a good moment reading a good comic, is the same.  But also every country has their local jokes and that kinda deal can be similar.