Stray Dogs was one of the best comics of 2021, following a group of dogs slowly realising that their current owner was a serial killer who had killed all of their former owners. It’s a great done-in-one original horror story.
So it’s disappointing (but perhaps not unsurprising) that Image would try to cash in on that success by forcing a completely unnecessary prequel/follow-up in the form of Dog Days. Did you want to see how each of the dogs had been procured by the killer? Me neither!
The stories aren’t terrible - they’re just way too short. Because there are so many dogs, writer Tony Fleecs can only give so many pages to each one and so just as you’re getting into one story, it’s over and you’re onto the next. It’s very unsatisfying.
Trish Forstner’s Don Bluth-esque art remains delightful and the story of Victor provides a coda to the main storyline (the only one that’s not a prequel), even if it’s a pointless one. And I liked the twist in Henry’s story too.
But the overall effect is the creators trying to stretch very little material into something book length and it reads like what it is: an insubstantial, and entirely superfluous, offering. The page count is beefed up by - I’m not kidding - 40 pages of horror movie-themed variant covers!
Stray Dogs is a great comic - definitely check it out if you’ve not already - and I look forward to both creators’ next books, but don’t bother with the needless Dog Days.
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