Faith Erin Hicks pairs a socially awkward hockey girl with an outgoing, confident drama boy in her latest YA graphic novel. Alix loves hockey, but her teammates... not so much. Team Captain Lindsay is a bully and none of the other girls stand up for Alix for fear of Lindsay turning on them next. Classic toxic high school behavior. One day something in Alix flips and she punches Lindsay. She's horrified by her behavior and, most of all, the fact that she didn't seem to be in control of herself at all.
Title: Spellbound
Creators: Format: EBook
Color: Color
Romanceiness: Romantic Elements
Heat: R
Tags: fantasy straight
Creators: Format: EBook
Color: Color
Romanceiness: Romantic Elements
Heat: R
Tags: fantasy straight
Synopsis from the Creator:
From Vol. 1:
This first volume of the ongoing Spellbound series initiates us into Dufaux and Munuera’s Medieval-style fantasy land, a land brimming with witchcraft, demons, enchantments and foul-play. The whole of Middleland has been thrown into turmoil by the sudden and brutal murder of the king. The unfortunate victim’s dying wish was that his daughter, Blanche, should take the throne, rather than her weak-spirited brother. Thus Blanche finds herself catapulted into a position of power that she never expected, or even wished for. The grief-stricken young woman is forced to renounce her lover, and on top of that, the enemy’s army is assembled at the country’s border, poising to strike. Blanche looks like she’s off to a promising start as queen of the land, but unfortunately she’s no match for the various plots to topple her… at least, not yet…
Love In Panels' Review:
This is a hard one to review, as I both loved and hated pieces of it. Each of the four volumes is 50-60 pages, combining for something close to graphic novel length. Each of the volumes is a distinct arc, but the overall story isn't complete until the last two pages of volume 4.
Here's the part I hated: there is no Happily Ever After. That's the covenant that the Romance genre has with its readers, and since it's been broken here, I have rated this as "romantic elements" and not "definitely a romance."
The first book opens with Blanche leaving her lover, Gaspard, because she has been called upon to serve her kingdom as the new queen. He takes it very poorly and visits an evil witch, Miranda, to put a curse on her.
Bad Things happen. Miranda is evil, after all. Blanche's brother is also evil, as is her mother. Everyone is evil, basically. Eventually, Blanche meets Maldoror, the prince of the World Below (hell) and he's very much a Lucifer archetype. He's blond and handsome and they fall in love. He helps her while everyone is scheming against her, she brings him back with a kiss from a magically-induced coma. Very standard fantasy/fairytale stuff. I'm going to try not to give spoilers here, but it's clear from about halfway in that Blanche is becoming everything she hates. She's becoming violent and untrusting and... kind of evil, herself. It could be argued that she's never actually a "good" character to begin with, but the reader does start out this journey giving her the benefit of the doubt.
In the first two volumes, I had serious issues with the portrayal of Blanche's scheming brother. He's a hunchback, and the story was falling into that ableist trap of making the disabled character evil... because he's disabled. The mother was similarly one-dimensional, as was the witch, Miranda. I was starting to feel like every "bad guy" in the book was going to be female or disabled. Not cool. Enter the advisors and "allies." We got a whole bunch of evil, white, able-bodied men. It became clear to me that maybe this was a story in which no one is actually good, which somehow bothered me less. Equal-opportunity evil, or somesuch thing.
In the end, I don't know if I can recommend this to romance readers or not. There are some stunningly romantic moments, a few interesting magical events, and many, many battles. As a French-to-English translation, some nuance may have been lost, but I think the art manages to convey the emotion and magic of the tale adequately. If you need an HEA, don't pick this up. If you want to see an anti-heroine killing lots of people and not ever being slut-shamed? This might be for you.
The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich is almost exactly what the cover suggests: a whimsical queer romance with lots of cheese.
While everyone else was busy theorizing about Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens, Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings were captivated by the story of Baron von Steuben, a Prussian military strategist--and kind of a con man, tbh--who played a pivotal role in the American Revolutionary War. Washington's Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben is the expansion of Trujillo's much shorter comic at The Nib and is a much more thorough biography supplemented with author commentary, historical context and the inclusion of other figures of the time.
Thanks to Shop Your Shelves, I finally read Life of Melody, by Mari Costa. It's everything I hoped it would be.
Way back in 2018, I wrote a post about Merfolk in Romance and included what was then a webtoon publishing on Tapas, The Sea in You. Five years later--dang, I've been at this for a while--Iron Circus is publishing it in all its sapphic underwater glory! This full-color book is out in March, 2023.
When folks come to me looking for high quality erotic comics (this is more frequent than you might think), I almost always point them toward Iron Circus Comics' Smut Peddler series. These are giant collections of just-long-enough comics full of consent and joy, pining and hope, diverse bodies and identities and more. They're often weird, unique or thought-provoking. In all, they're good smutty fun.
Money Shot is a classic case of an entertaining premise falling apart after the first few issues. Without doing any research, I suspect that the creative team had planned out one arc and then the series was successful enough that they got more issues and just flailed about for a while. All that said, the first trade is very funny and appropriately porny.
Sigh. Chef's Kiss is pretty to look at (art below) but it's really shallowly developed. The opening scenes consist of Ben moving in with three roommates shortly after graduating from college. He applies to and interviews for lots of writing and editing jobs before stumbling upon a job opening at a nearby vegetarian restaurant. Thus begins a drawn out plot in which Ben has to cook three existing dishes and develop one new one for the restaurant and get approval of the chef's pig, Watson.
I posted a bit about Embodied over on the Love in Panels Instagram account, but I loved this book so much I wanted to make sure it got to as many sets of eyes as possible.
I received a digital review copy of the book but never got around to reading it, so when I saw it's shiny glory on display at my local indie bookstore, I picked it up. The cover is truly gorgeous, a computer image doesn't do it justice. (It's shiny in that silver-blue-purple way that only the best drag gowns are.)
The Girl From the Sea is a sapphic young adult graphic novel with a summer romance between a human teen and a selkie. Ostertag's recognizable art style is rendered here more clearly than in The Witch Boy series and Maarta Laiho's colors are beautiful. But yet again, I'm annoyed at a publisher for putting only one name on the front of the book when it's a collaboration. Colorists are so important and deserve credit, dammit. Worse, Laiho isn't listed anywhere on the book page on Amazon. Here's why it's especially important in this case: I think Laiho did a better job than Ostertag usually does and therefore this is a better product. It feels almost abusive. *shakes fist at Scholastic*
