Review by Frank Plowright

There’s a fair chance that anyone seeing Dog Days in isolation will find Trish Forstner’s beguiling art captivating enough to make an instant purchase. However, begin reading and they’ll be scratching their heads. It’s easy enough to pick up on a series of short strips giving information about various dogs, all abducted from their original owners and those owners frequently also ending up dead, but that’s all it seems to be. What the hell…?

It’s because despite the attractive art Dog Days is very much a subordinate companion to the original Stray Dogs graphic novel. That’s an original crime story with the truth about a serial killer revealed by the dogs he abducted, but Dog Days is for readers who simply need more of the dogs themselves. A dozen dogs are featured, each a different breed with several exotic, each of them given personality in Forster’s delightful drawings. As before, she works from layouts provided by Tone Rodriguez.

However, with Tony Fleecs’ main story told elsewhere, the art can’t disguise too many repeated variations on the same theme, appealing to one audience at the cost of excluding everyone else. Those bored readers possibly won’t even reach the final stories, which would be a shame as they’re by some distance the best. They feature Victor the Dalmation once a fire station mascot, who came to a tragic end in the original story where you may not have even noticed he was missing a leg. His pre-kidnap life has greater resonance than most of the remainder, not least for there being no murder, as that was a pivotal moment in Stray Dogs, and the final short heads back to the fire station for the only inclusion taking place after the main story.

The story content is backed-up by a large selection of covers for the two serialised issues, almost to the point overkill. However, anyone who can’t get enough of Forstner’s cute dogs will be delighted at the selection of pin-ups and movie poster pastiches.