Luke Healy makes fake celebrity memories with four panels and a Rotring

Britney Spears walks into a TK Maxx. She loves Oreos. The next problem is finding out how that tiny fact might make her behave strangely between the clothes racks.

That is roughly the engine Luke Healy has built for his Celebrity Encounter Comics.1 His own site lists the series from 2025.2

The format is small enough to repeat: a celebrity, a mundane location, one specific feeling or obsession, then four panels.

The constraint does part of the work

Healy says he starts by choosing a celebrity and a place. He then gives the celebrity a strong, simple emotional point of view. His example to It’s Nice That is almost an equation: Britney Spears, TK Maxx, a love of Oreos.1

From there, he looks for the odd behaviour that combination might produce.

Specificity matters more than the broad premise. Bad Bunny at M&S is more useful than “celebrity in supermarket”. Sabrina Carpenter at Yo Sushi already supplies a room, scale and props.

Google can choose the costume

For visual reference, Healy often starts with an image search and lets an early result determine what the celebrity is wearing. If the picture shows a ball gown, the ball gown can follow them into an aggressively ordinary shop.1

It is an arbitrary rule, but it removes one more blank-page decision.

He pencils the comics on an iPad, prints those pencils, then inks them with a Rotring Isograph on ordinary printer paper. He works quickly and says he likes the scrappy result.1

There is a pleasing mismatch in that workflow: an intentionally disposable joke still passes through physical ink.

A routine instead of one big idea

The series grew out of a live show where Healy improvised fictional, embarrassing celebrity encounters.1

Turning that mechanism into comics makes it repeatable. An idea does not need to justify a whole book. It needs enough tension for four boxes.

That may be the most reusable part of the process. A short constraint can function less like a restriction and more like a starting system. Tomorrow, replace the celebrity, shop and tiny obsession. The machine starts again.