The Dog Who Taught Rafael Mantesso to Draw With Less

Most people meet their first Bull Terrier in a cartoon. Rafael Mantesso did too.

He was nine years old, watching Eek! the Cat, when Sharky the guard dog came barreling onto the screen: a white, torpedo-headed menace who growled in subtitles and blew up his own doghouse on a regular basis. Mantesso assumed the animal was pure cartoon exaggeration. Surely nobody had looked at a real dog and drawn that. Then came Scud, the snarling dog next door in Toy Story. Then the nameless Bull Terrier in Babe: Pig in the City, who nearly drowns in a canal, is pulled out by a pig, and spends the rest of the film as that pig's devoted bodyguard. And finally, from the window of a school bus heading home from a field trip, he saw a woman walking two white Bull Terriers along the Copacabana boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. "I was marked for life," he writes.

Years later he got one of his own. His name was Jimmy, and he became one of the most famous dogs on the internet.

Mantesso started posting pictures of Jimmy on Instagram in 2010, at one of the lowest points of his life, broke and out of work. He began drawing around his dog, adding simple black lines to photographs so that Jimmy became a chef, a boxer, a daydreamer. Jimmy loved being the center of attention, and the world loved Jimmy right back. The pictures went viral and became A Dog Named Jimmy, published by Penguin Random House in eight languages. By Mantesso's count he took more than 200,000 photographs of his dog, and every cent the fame earned went straight back into Jimmy's life: a bigger yard, more sun, more grass, more time together.

There was a purpose behind the jokes, too. Bull Terriers have long carried a "killer dog" reputation, and Mantesso and Jimmy met it in person, from strangers who crossed the street to neighbors who wouldn't share an elevator. He answered with humor. Frame by frame, a goofy white dog with an egg-shaped head did more to change how people saw the breed than any lecture could.

Jimmy is gone now. Bull Terriers is what Mantesso made next, and it is the most personal thing he has published. He drew it himself, from memory and from the stories Bull Terrier owners around the world sent him.

It opens with a warning. If you find yourself reading this and thinking maybe you should get a Bull Terrier, he says, stop. Sit down. Breathe. These dogs are "not for everyone. They're barely for anyone." They are "emotional hurricanes in a muscular eggshell," and they need all of you, every single day. Only if your heart still thumps after all that does he let you in: "then welcome. You're one of us."

From there the book moves in three stages. First comes a funny, unsparing essay on life with the breed: couches unstuffed while you run a quick errand, dogs that go through drywall like a cartoon, an owner who banned all fabric from her house after her dog ate half the bedding in a week, and the famous "hucklebutt," the crazed figure-eight sprint every Bull Terrier owner knows by heart. Then comes the story of Jimmy. And then the art: page after page of Mantesso's clean black line drawings, each paired with a single caption.

The captions are the heart of the book, and they are very good. "Bull Terriers are not pets. Bull Terriers are lifestyle adjustments." "Bulldozers in velvet gloves." "Bull Terriers don't bark. They talk." One at a time, they read like jokes one owner would send another. Read in order, they trace a whole life with a dog: the chaos of the early years, the obsession with that egg-shaped head, the stubbornness, the things swallowed and the trips to the vet, the devotion, and finally the goodbye. The last pages are quiet. "They never learned goodbye," one reads. And the very last: "Even gone, Bull Terriers stay."

That shape is what lifts the book above a novelty gift. It is laugh-out-loud funny for most of its length, and then it breaks your heart, which is more or less what owning a Bull Terrier is like.

A note for readers who like to draw. Mantesso works with almost nothing: a curve for the head, two small triangles for the eyes, and a great deal of white space. The Bull Terrier is the perfect subject for that style. Its head runs from skull to nose in one smooth line, without the dip between forehead and muzzle that nearly every other breed has, so a single oval with two slanted eyes is instantly recognizable. With so few lines on the page, every one of them has to carry feeling, whether it's the tilt of a head or the distance between a dog and the edge of the paper. It is a small masterclass in drawing with less.

And a little history for anyone meeting the breed for the first time. Bull Terriers were developed in nineteenth-century England, and breeder James Hinks is credited with refining the all-white dog in the 1860s. Victorians nicknamed it "the White Cavalier." Owners today will tell you "class clown" is closer to the truth, and Mantesso would agree, though near the end of the book he goes further. Bull Terriers, he writes, belong "on Olympus," and "life before them is ordinary, and life after them is never enough."

Bull Terrier people will recognize their own dogs on almost every page. Fans who followed Jimmy for years will find the last chapter of a story they cared about. And anyone who has ever loved a dog and lost one will understand exactly why this book exists.

Bull Terriers: A Portrait of the Breed That Stole My Heart by Rafael Mantesso arrives October 13, 2026, in paperback and hardcover, and is available for pre-order now.