Dating apps are exhausting, meeting someone in person isn’t much better, and now apparently there’s a version of “it’s complicated” that involves fangs. Dinner Date, a new five-issue limited series from Ignition Press, hits comic shops October 7, 2026, and it’s already checking a lot of boxes for us: horror, romance, comedy, and a queer love story we can’t wait to see play out.
Dinner Date #1
Publisher: Ignition Press
Writer: Joanne Starer
Artist: Khary Randolph
Colorist: Emilio Lopez
Letterer: AndWorld Design
Release date: October 7, 2026
So, What’s the Story?
Syd was already burned out on the apps and not totally over her ex, the kind of ex she still drunk-texts on a bad night, when a date took an unexpected turn and left her undead. She wasn’t looking for a life change, and she definitely wasn’t expecting her next relationship to double as a meal plan, but here she is, newly a vampire and stuck rethinking what “chemistry” even means now.
Across town, Izzy is driving for a rideshare app while trying to get her real career off the ground in New York City, and one late-night pickup changes everything. Syd gets in the back seat, something clicks instantly, and neither of them is quite sure yet if this is the start of something real or the end of Izzy’s night in a much more literal sense.
Who’s Making Dinner Date?
Joanne Starer writes, Khary Randolph illustrates, Emilio Lopez colors, and AndWorld Design letters, with Ignition Press publishing.
Starer’s the reason I trust a project on name alone at this point. Her DC minis Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville and Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over, both with artist Stephen Byrne, are the books that got me into Fire and Ice at all. I’m not a big DC reader, but Starer made the characters easy to fall for without any prior context, heart, humor, and genuine chemistry between the two leads, and both minis ended up among my favorite DC books, period.
She and Randolph also previously teamed up on Sirens of the City at BOOM! Studios, a gritty urban fantasy following a pregnant runaway teen fighting off supernatural threats in 1980s New York, so Dinner Date isn’t their first time working together, and that history shows.
Randolph, for his part, also worked with colorist Emilio Lopez before on Excellence at Image Comics, so this is actually a reunion on two fronts, writer and artist from Sirens, artist and colorist from Excellence. Which means the whole core team here has already proven it can work together.
Why We’re Watching This One
The premise alone is pure fun, but it’s also genuinely a fresh spin rather than just genre mashup for its own sake. Vampire stories are everywhere, and so are meet-cutes, but pairing “I just got turned into a vampire by a bad date” with “and now I have a crush on the woman driving me home” is a specific, weird, well-observed idea, not a generic hook. The setup does double duty too: it’s a horror comic with real teeth and a romcom with real heart, and getting both to work at once, rather than picking one and treating the other as garnish, is genuinely hard to pull off.
And then there’s the fact that it’s queer, which matters to us plainly and without hedging. It’s not a twist or a subplot bolted onto an otherwise straight story, it’s the actual center of the book: two women, one of them undead, falling for each other in the middle of chaos. Horror-romance still defaults to straight pairings more often than not, so a book that leads with a queer relationship as the whole point, not a side detail, earns extra attention from us every time.
The main cover from Randolph is vibrant and immediately eye-catching too, it’s doing a lot of the same visual work that made us stop scrolling for Sirens of the City back in the day.
Ignition Press is also just building a genuinely great catalog. They keep putting out original, distinct books with real personality, Dispatched and The Dogsitter are both good recent examples, and Dinner Date looks like it’s continuing that streak.
Who Should Add This to Their Pull List?
Fans of romantic horror-comedy, queer romance readers, and anyone who enjoyed Starer’s work on Fire & Ice or Sirens of the City should have this on their list. Ignition Press readers in general should feel comfortable adding it sight unseen too, given the publisher’s track record so far.
Release Details
Dinner Date #1 releases October 7, 2026, from Ignition Press, priced at $4.99 for 32 pages, as the first issue of a five-issue limited series. Cover A comes from Khary Randolph, with variant covers by Steve Lieber (Cover B), and Corin Howell (Cover C, Retailer Incentive).
FAQ
When does Dinner Date come out? Issue #1 releases October 7, 2026.
Who is writing Dinner Date? Joanne Starer, known for Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville, Fire & Ice: When Hell Freezes Over, and Sirens of the City.
Who is drawing Dinner Date? Khary Randolph, with colors by Emilio Lopez and letters by AndWorld Design.
What publisher is releasing Dinner Date? Ignition Press.
Is Dinner Date a new series, limited series, or one-shot? It’s a new five-issue limited series.
Have Joanne Starer and Khary Randolph worked together before? Yes, they previously teamed up on Sirens of the City at BOOM! Studios.
Who should read Dinner Date? Fans of romantic horror-comedy, queer romance readers, and anyone who enjoyed Starer’s previous work.
