On a narrow stretch of Mosque Street in Hong Kong, a trench-coated man and his dog step through the wall like they own the place. It’s not graffiti, exactly. It’s not street art in the stencil-and-slogan sense either. It’s a mural—but it hums like a comic book, shot through with punk energy and melancholy. Behind it is a Czech artist known only as ToyBox. And she’s standing nearby in a white paper-mâché cat mask, hand-tipped with red and black marks, watching people stop and stare.
“I call myself ToyBox,” she says, calm and direct behind the mask. “I’m a comics author and illustrator… but in recent years, I do a lot of mural art.”
What she’s painted here isn’t just a character. It’s a mythology in motion. The man in the mural is Peter the Street—her original creation, a sort of wandering spirit of Prague, pulled from 19th-century flâneur tradition and the cobblestone ghosts of her hometown. This mural is his visit to Hong Kong. It’s also something closer: an elegy for a dog, a love letter to lost cities, a stitched-up self-portrait in brush and spray paint.
“I’ve always been into the small stories around Prague,” ToyBox says. “I started reading them, collecting them. Now I’m working on a book about this guy.”
Peter is flanked by a dog—big, quiet, loyal. Not imagined. Real. ToyBox rescued her from a freezing car after the dog was discarded by backyard breeders.
“She was kept in a car, after she was done with breeding puppies,” she says. “They just left her there to die during winter. The guys from the shelter came and saved her.”
ToyBox saw the dog’s photo online and couldn’t look away. “I thought, ‘I must go for the dog.’ I just wanted to make sure that for the rest of her life, she would be happy.”
The dog was eleven. The vet said she might last six months. She stayed with ToyBox for more than three years. She saw the sea in Spain. She slept warm. She was loved.
Now she’s in the mural, immortal. “There’s a big wide dog-shaped place in my heart,” ToyBox says, quietly.
The mural sprawls just outside the Double Black café, a short walk from ToyBox’s gallery exhibition at PMQ. She designed three versions before settling on this one—each iteration layered with comics composition, color theory, and pure emotion. It’s not just street art. It’s story architecture.
“I like my murals to have this dynamic feeling,” she says. “But also to be realistic.”
That realism doesn’t come from nowhere. ToyBox was classically trained in stage design at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She knows perspective and lighting. She knows when to work wet and when to pull back. You see it in her process: acrylic brushwork for faces and bodies, spray paint for the skyline, the coats, the flat color pops that make everything vibrate.
But technique isn’t her only language.
“I come from punk,” she says. “And from country culture, actually. There’s a mixture of that in me—and in my work.”
That mix includes underground comics from the ’60s, Vertigo-era indies like The Sandman, and a steady diet of European zines. As a teenager, she traveled with a techno sound system, organizing illegal raves across Italy, Ukraine, and her native Czech Republic.
“We made silkscreens, printed our own posters, went to street parties, squatted buildings,” she says. “For a large part of my life, I was part of this alternative movement.”
It shows. Her award-winning 2015 comic My Vinnetou Book—which took home prizes for both best comic and best illustration in the Czech Republic—is steeped in that outsider energy. When fans began asking how she made it, she published her own comic-making textbook, blending DIY philosophy with practical how-to.
“I come from DIY culture,” she says. “I believe we can do everything ourselves—independently of the mainstream.”
The mask came early on, when she was still doing illegal graffiti and needed to stay anonymous. It stayed for other reasons. “I have kids. I have a husband. I don’t want to be exposed,” she says. “But the mask also helps me be honest in my art. It lets me say what I want.”
And that’s the point. ToyBox isn’t trying to build a brand. She’s building a world—a visual language where comics, murals, stray dogs, and urban legends coexist. Where punk kids grow up to become working artists. Where masks reveal more than they hide.
Peter the Street keeps exploring. The dog keeps pace beside him. And ToyBox, invisible but ever-present, keeps painting that city in her mind across different cities in the world — one wall at a time.
