Created by Robert Venditti and David Lapham
“Just because pizza is round doesn’t mean you can cut corners.”
HANK HOWARD isn’t a man you meet every day. No matter how you slice it.
Sure, he’s a private eye, a hard-boiled and slightly rumpled doofus right out of central casting, complete with the obligatory fedora and raincoat, and topped with a steady stream of tough guy patter, but he really only has one client: his employer, Big Caligula Pizza, a mid-level American pizza chain with aspirations.
It’s all slightly tongue-in-cheek, with an almost-Rockford Files mix of wry skepticism and world-weary humour. Plus pizza, which Hank takes very seriously.
Maybe even too seriously.
His worldview seems completely shaped by pizza, and he’s prone to offering such pie-shaped observations as “Too many bakers burn the cheese” and “Pizza is a greasy business.” Behind the cynicism, though, lurks a crushed idealist, hoping to bring back the good ol’ days when pizza “used to be an honest business.”
In The Two Hollywoods, for example, in his efforts to make the world safe for pizza, he’s dispatched to a Hollywood, Florida restaurant to investigate some delivery shenanigans when he stumbles upon a case that will send him scurrying cross-country to the other Hollywood, pitting him against an Australian drug cartel, fire-spitting flamethrowers, plenty of gunfire, a thug kangaroo and various local and federal law enforcement agencies.
All in the name of pizza.
* * * *
Hank Howard, Pizza Detective has a rather convoluted and confusing history that I’m still trying to sort out. The initial, originally crowd-funded issue, subtitled Caligula’s Safe, was originally offered in 2021 as a 24-page one-off, available for a limited time only in selected comic shops, and going for a mere buck. Put out by tiny, idiosyncratic publisher Bad Idea, they issued an expanded version of the story as a two-issue comic book in 2026 as The Two Hollywoods. Or maybe it was a whole new story. It’s hard to tell.
Meanwhile, a third comic, A Slice of Life, apparently an all-new story, is promised for later in 2026, in which we’re told Hank will be back in Florida, returning to his hometown of Tampa, investigating a murder, and “locking lips with a long-lost flame.”
Lord knows how that one will be offered…
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
New York Times bestseller Robert Venditti has written more than three hundred comic books and graphic novels, including stories featuring The Flash, Justice League, Superman, Hawkman, Green Lantern, Wesley Dodds: The Sandman, and X-O Manowar, and has adapted Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians for comics. He lives in Atlanta, where he both writes and serves as a storytelling consultant for various entertainment brands.
Eisner-winning artist and writer David Lapham is pretty much a legend in comics, best known for Stray Bullets, a long-running and possibly on-going series which he wrote, drew and lettered himself (and published with his wife Maria), and the classic noir miniseries Murder Me Dead. He’s written and/or drawn Batman, Daredevil, Punisher and Wolverine, and more recently the crime titles Good As Dead, American Caper and Hank Howard, Pizza Detective, where he even slipped in a sly wink to Stray Bullets.
UNDER OATH
- “The thing to establish right out of the gate is how seriously Robert Venditti writes this otherwise ridiculous premise: Yes, he’s using tropes and prototypes of the hardboiled, noir genre, but instead of injecting some silly joke in every page, Venditti just allows the absurdity of the situation to drive the comedy and, naturally, provide action and suspense just by virtue of the story that he’s telling.”
— PirateDaveZOMG, on The Two Hollywoods (Leagueofcomicbookgeeks.com) - “The lead story is illustrated by David Lapham, whose Stray Bullets is the single greatest crime comic of all time… One of Lapham’s great skills is illustrating ordinary people in his style in ways that are evocative of their actions and character, and he shines here…”
— Zack Quaintance, on Caligula’s Safe (comicsbookcase.com)
THE EVIDENCE
- “I’ve been in hotter kitchens. I can handle the heat.”
- “Pizza is a greasy business.”
COMICS
HANK HOWARD, PIZZA DETECTIVE: CALIGULA’S SAFE | Buy this book
(2021, Bad Idea)
Black & white
24 pages
Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: David Lapham- HANK HOWARD, PIZZA DETECTIVE: THE TWO HOLLYWOODS
(2026, Bad Idea)
2 issues
Black & white
Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: David Lapham - HANK HOWARD, PIZZA DETECTIVE: A SLICE OF LIFE
(2026, Bad Idea)
Black & white
Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: David Lapham
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
