Graphic novel of the month: Dogs on Dates by Luke Healy

For their first date, Brad and Bernie, two young gay dogs negotiating life and love in the big city, arrange to meet at a cafe specialising in Nepalese dumplings. Brad arrives on time and orders a platter of veg momos for two. Bernie, owing to a series of increasingly wild mishaps – his bike’s brake cable is cut, he hurtles downhill past the cafe, his front wheel flies into the river, a goat eats his flowers and wallet – is running catastrophically late. Before their relationship has even properly begun, disasters are piling up fast.

In the cafe, as fellow diners get wind of the apparent no-show, Brad’s predicament sparks a debate about hope. Is it naive to believe that romance can still flourish in a world of let-downs, or cynical to insist that it can’t? Is love merely an illusion spun by capitalism to sell candy hearts, as one customer puts it? Or could two slightly hapless pooches – one a terminally uncool charity worker, the other a college dropout – forge a lifelong union despite their proneness to accidents?

These are some of the questions that animate Luke Healy’s new book Dogs on Dates, an endearingly scrappy piece of work whose charms make up for its occasional misfires. Healy is the author of several graphic novels including, most recently, Self-Esteem and the End of the World. That book was an ambitious, often agonised meditation on artistic failure, climate collapse and the perils of remote working from Greek mountainsides. This book, though it forfeits its predecessor’s splashes of colour for clean-lined black and white, is a much lighter, fizzier affair. It engages with serious questions about masculinity, career snobbery and class divides, but mostly it’s a gag-heavy reflection on how it feels to chase love in the digital age.

Brad and Bernie survive that disaster-ridden first date and embark on many others. Healy zeroes in on four of them. One involves hunting for an elusive sandwich truck that’s big on social media. In another, the pair get stuck in a low-budget escape room with Bernie’s ex-boyfriend, whose presence sends them both spiralling. The rest of the dates, which are all numbered, each unfold over a single page, in just two or four panels, which gives them the snappiness of a comic strip. This suits Healy’s gag rate: he has so many one-liners about viral food trends and bad fashion choices – some great, some a bit mystifying – it’s useful to have a release valve.

What there aren’t many jokes about, curiously, is the experience of being a dog. Stories centring on talking animals are almost always a way of reflecting back on human society, but usually the species in question is factored in, its traits explored to some degree. Brad and Bernie, however, are really just humans with dog heads. If those heads (and tails) serve a purpose for Healy, it’s to create a measure of dissociation – and lovable cuteness – in his survey of modern gay life. That “dogs” alliterates with “dates” may also have been a factor.

Things don’t go altogether smoothly for the two lovers in the story; hope v cynicism remains hanging in the balance. It doesn’t help that Bernie is terrified of failure and would rather quit than risk the humiliation of crashing and burning. The fact that Brad’s family are overachievers who can’t abide the idea of their son dating a layabout only intensifies the issue. (Interestingly, career prospects seem to loom larger in their world than sexual orientation; the only whiff of homophobia comes when one of Brad’s brothers suggests that Brad is not man enough to use his golf clubs.)

But it’s their shared love of lazing about that makes Brad and Bernie such a good match. They take enormous pleasure in idling in cafes or watching “proposal fail” videos at home in their underwear. When, during a hiatus, they go on dates with other dogs who fixate on exercising or fast cars, you know it’s not going to work out. Love doesn’t depend on its participants being perfect or even particularly impressive, Healy seems to be saying. It’s precisely because of this couple’s foibles and perceived insufficiencies that we root for them to succeed.

Dogs on Dates by Luke Healy is published by Faber (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £14.44 (15% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Illustration by Luke Healy