Luke Healy: 'I have a big beef with rom-coms that have realistic endings'

Dublin cartoonist Luke Healy tells Don O'Mahony about his canine take on the romantic comedy

In Dogs on Dates, Luke Healy delivers an infectiously joyous ending that portrays dates not just as stepping stones to a defined goal but as an ongoing voyage of discovery. Picture: Dashiell Silva

Tue, 11 Aug, 2026 - 21:30

Don O’Mahony

The titles of Luke Healy’s graphic novels offer a sort of poetic intrigue — How to Survive in the North, Americana, Self-Esteem and the End of the World — but his latest is his most baldly named to date: Dogs on Dates.

“I was trying to stick to the Boss Baby rule,” the Dublin cartoonist explains, “which is that film The Boss Baby. It’s like the whole premise for the film is in the title. It’s just about a baby who acts like a boss. So, this is just about dogs going on dates. The whole thing is right there.”

Set in an anthropomorphic world of dog-like people, Dogs on Dates follows the budding romance of Bernie and Brad through a series of dates, most pithily delivered, recording their growing sense of mutual contentment, but interspersed with lengthier accounts of more fraught rendezvous, proving the path to true love may never be smooth, but the journey is usually worth it. If something of the spirit of Nora Ephron hovers over it, it’s because Healy intends it to be his take on the romantic comedy.

“I have a big beef with rom-coms that have realistic endings,” he ventures. “I want the fantasy. If I’m going to follow reading a character’s romance – a kind of a light, fun read anyway – I want that payoff of them being together. I guess that’s a slight spoiler for the ending of the book. But I like rom-coms when they have a happy ending.”

In a brilliantly conceived montage, Healy delivers an infectiously joyous ending that portrays dates not just as stepping stones to a defined goal but as an ongoing voyage of discovery. Just as it conveys the notion that no date is a wasted experience, the book itself also serves as a lesson that no idea is either.

Dogs on Dates was originally in development for four years as an animated series, Healy reveals, “but never ended up going ahead, which is why I got to make the book then, which was kind of a nice consolation. And the thing that people kept bringing up while they were working on the series was like, ‘oh, it’s about how dating is awkward.’ ‘Oh, isn’t it about the awkwardness of dating?’ And I kept having to say to them: No. It’s about how dating is fun. Like dating is cool and fun, you know. Maybe I’m just lucky, and I have mostly had a really fun time dating, but I wanted the book to reflect that. Yeah, there’s awkward bits, but it’s supposed to be a good time.”

Healy’s novels to date appear to reveal something about him. This is not just confined to Americana, his account of walking the 2660 mile-long Pacific Coast Trail in 2016. While such contemporary leading lights of literary comics as fellow Faber author Adrian Tomine have moved back and forth between clearly defined books of fiction and memoir, Healy’s at times blur the lines between fiction and autobiography, creating moments of metafiction and possibly autofiction.

“Well, I have that terrible habit of naming my characters Luke Healy when it is fiction,” he says, affecting an apologetic air. “I always end up doing that.”

This is done to great effect in his book The Con Artists, a story with the theme of deception at its heart, where a character resembling the author identifies himself to the reader as Luke Healy, then reads a statement claiming the characters depicted are entirely fictional, before donning a moustache to become the central character, a London-based, Irish stand-up comedian – all things that Healy is. Rather than inculcating a sense of ironic detachment, it engenders a greater sense of investment from the reader who, rather than passively accepting certain events at face value, is left actively wondering if they, or certain episodes from his subsequent novel, the more brooding Self-Esteem and the End of World, could actually have happened?

Is it all pure fiction?

“It depends from book to book,” he considers. “How do I put it? I think what I’m always trying to convey is emotional honesty, I suppose. I want people to be able to read the books and understand how I felt during a certain experience or a certain time in my life.”

So, what does Dogs on Dates say about Luke Healy?

“That I love dating,” he chuckles heartily. “Shallow! But I had such a great time. And I just loved doing it and I wanted to make a book about how fun it is to go on dates with somebody.”