PRIDE MONTH 2026! One of the hardest things to capture, in prose or visual art, is that heady feeling of falling in love with someone. This isn’t simply because that territory is so ripe for cliché, but because of how difficult it is to describe the rush of dopamine that two people feel when they find each other more than a little interesting. It’s a fine line between cute and starting to sound like a syrupy romance. Luke Healy has pulled this off almost effortlessly in the past, and has done it again, only this time with the help of two dogs.
Set in a place called Dog City populated by all kinds of canines, it’s where Brad meets Bernie under the most ridiculous circumstances. Healy tracks them as they meet more often and slowly find a way of navigating everything that life throws at them. In Dogs on Dates the narrative switches from page-length descriptions of their dates to longer chapters that resemble episodes of a sitcom. On one of these dates, for example, the couple end up being kidnapped at sea by a billionaire. On another, the two of them try working through a knotty emotional problem while being stuck in an Escape Room for a friend’s birthday. There’s also an incident at a family gathering where Bernie is somehow mistaken for a world-famous graffiti artist — and every one of these events is funny.
Healy introduces a host of characters from Brad and Bernie’s lives: their friends, parents, siblings and ex-partners, all of whom play subtle roles in accentuating the bond that these two protagonists build as they work towards a place of emotional safety and acceptance. It also allows him to show how all relationships, gay or straight, must invariably deal with the same familial struggles and emotional baggage that can get in the way of creating something meaningful.
One of the things Healy does better than most other artists is dialogue, a skill that is presumably sharpened by his ability to perform live comedy. A few years ago, while promoting The Con Artists, he mentioned the satisfaction that came from “nailing a joke’s structure either on stage or on the comics page.” That ability shows up time and again in these pages too, as Brad and Bernie discuss and dissect everything from food and popular culture to gender and self-worth.
For every laugh-out-loud episode, there are also moments of quiet reflection, such as the one where Brad struggles with notions of masculinity, or when Bernie comes to terms with his inability to handle rejection. There is a lot of sensitivity on display here, especially when one considers that these feelings are being filtered through the lives of two anthropomorphic canines.
Dogs on Dates is the kind of book that can easily spawn a sequel because of how fully fleshed out and relatable these characters are. It’s easy to see them grow old together and laugh with them as they cope with eventual midlife crises or the challenges of old age. Healy hints at this in the final pages but, even if he chooses not to follow them down that path, what he gives us here is enough.
Luke Healy (W/A) • Drawn & Quarterly/Faber & Faber, $28.00/£16.99
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Review by Lindsay Pereira
