When Chris joins the staff at her local record store, she’s surprised to find out that her co-workers share a secret: they’re all members of a secret fight club that take on the patriarchy and fight crime!
Starry-eyed Chris has just started the dream job every outcast kid in town wants: working at Vinyl Mayhem. It's as rad as she imagined; her boss is BOSS, her co-workers spend their time arguing over music, pushing against the patriarchy, and endlessly trying to form a band. When Rosie Riot, the staff's favorite singer, mysteriously vanishes the night before her band’s show, Chris discovers her co-workers are doing more than just sorting vinyl . . . Her local indie record store is also a front for a teen girl vigilante fight club!
Follow writer Carly Usdin (director of Suicide Kale) and artist Nina Vakueva (Lilith’s World) into Heavy Vinyl, where they deliver a rock and roll tale of intrigue and boundless friendship.
HIDE & SEEK: A CRYPTID TRIPTYCH is 79 pages of gorgeous smooching magic! From a cozy stroll through snowy hemlock forests to a deep dive through crystal caves, each story tells the tale of a search for love in a wild world of cryptids and magic. With art to charm and words to spellbind, this collection of three short comics from consummate artists Maria Frantz, Caitlin Like and Aud Koch is the perfect addition to your Hallowe’en (& General Spoopy-Feels) bookshelf!
The table of contents:
Maria Frantz’s “Hector and the Hidebehind” is the charming tale of a grumpy old biologist who finally meets the cryptid he’s been researching for years — and things don’t go as planned.
Caitlin Like’s “My Reluctant Prince” is a hilarious romp about a royal bodyguard who is banished from the surface world, and must choose between returning home or rescuing his kidnapped prince.
Aud Koch’s “The Flicker in the Tower” is an epic ballad about a dragon on a quest to save the cursed fairy prince he loves.(Each comic is guaranteed to contain one good smooch, or you get your money back!)
This story is mature - mostly for language and some sexual themes.
BOOK ONE: Make It Rain
“Alex Sleeper thought that when he went to a concert for Fallen Empire, a smallish emo band, that he was just going to keep his friend company. He didn’t realize he’d wake up the next day having been marked as an Aztec rain god’s next sacrifice. The deity has an unexpected change of heart and seeks to keep Alex safe, while Alex develops confusing feelings of his own for the immortal. With any luck, and lots of devotion from the god himself, Alex may survive the next few days.”
A cross-cultural romance with comedy, drama, magic, worldbuilding, and bilingual shenanigans.
Leif is a gardener in thrall to a mysterious debt, serving his native Sønheim at a foreign embassy. Thorn is a Knight of Ceannis who got severely burned while dragonslaying, and was rewarded with a cushy job guarding the embassy gates. (“Cushy” if you discount the smugglers, monsters, vampire aristocrats, industrial accidents, and slow-brewing ethical disasters….)
Thorn doesn’t speak Leif’s language too well at first — but as they get to know each other, he finds a lot of reasons to learn.
ADULTS ONLY Ed Fiedler is a common man. 61 years old and employed as a scribe in a royal palace, his most regular client is Lucardo von Gishaupt, a forever-young aristocrat . . . and member of the mysterious and revered Night Court. When the eternally 33-year-old Lucardo and the aging Ed develop feelings for one another, both are forced to contend with the culture shock of a mortal man's presence among the deathless, the perilous disapproval of the sitting Lord of the Night Court, and Ed's own ever-present mortality, threatening to bring an end to their romance in the blink of an everlasting eye. This is the first book in a planned four-volume series.
LETTERS FOR LUCARDO is that rare piece of graphic erotica that surprises me. I've grown accustomed to everything from tentacles to ghosts to aliens, but an actual human over the age of 40? Whoa.
Lucardo is a vampire, forever 33. His love interest, Edmund, is a 61 year old human, serving as scrivener (scribe, notary, etc) for the vampire Night Court. Their age difference is complicated by the fact that Lucardo is well over 400 years old, but physically much younger than Ed. Ed, however, feels unworthy and old at times. This could have turned into a story of "well, yeah, but I don't mind." Instead, Noora Heikkilä has written Lucardo as a tender person (and lover) who shows Ed his affection and attraction, rather than serving up empty platitudes. Readers are given an older man who is still a complete sexual and emotional being, with a lover who is deserving and appreciative of him.
The art? It's lovely. While reading, I was compelled to send a photo (above in the blog post) to a friend. I love the play of emotions over Ed's face and how Noora consistently shows us rather than tells us. It also doesn't hurt that Lucardo looks like a certain gentleman who played Jefferson in a popular musical...
As for the plot, it's more complex than I had anticipated. I was wondering how this story could be drawn out over 4 graphic novels, and now I know. I'm still not sure yet whether Lucardo's family is a) bigoted, b) evil, c) pranksters, 4) all of the above?
Two points of criticism:
1) Since readers are dropped into the story after months of flirting and conversation between Lucardo and Ed, we don't see much of what has drawn them together. (They pretty much get down to business, which is standard for erotica.) I would welcome development of their relationship via flashbacks or something.
2) WHAT THE HELL THAT ENDING. Maybe I shouldn't have started the series with only 1/4 books out.
If you'd like something sexy and sweet with a paranormal twist, this may just be the book for you. If you don't want one hell of a cliffhanger at the end? Wait a while. I'm basically sitting here stalking Iron Circus's feed waiting for the announcement of Book 2. (Yes, I'll let you know when it goes up!)
Razzmatazz is a fairy godparent, a magical entity tasked with overlooking Fairytales and their human protagonists for the duration of the tale. Humans are regarded as pretty difficult to work with by the fairies, as they keep having opinions and oppositions that derail their stories.
Razzmatazz decides that the perfect solution to get around how unaccommodating humans can be is to raise a Fairytale protagonist from infancy to her 18th birthday.
Despite his superiors telling him the idea is completely crazy, he commits to it. In doing so, he also commits to becoming co-parent with a beast named Bon, who found the child at the same time as him in the woods.
Bon and Razzmatazz settle into a human lifestyle and grow as parents, getting more and more attached to Melody. Razzmatazz begins to hesitate -confused by his feelings about his job, his new family, and Melody's future, leading both him and Bon to an important decision.
Life of Melody is a sweet, magical slice of life story for teen readers and up, originally posted as an exclusive Patreon comic.
LOVE NOT FOUND is a story about a young woman living in a time where touching has become outdated. She has recently moved to a new planet and finds that touching might not be such a bad idea. Now she is on a quest to find someone who wants to do things the old fashioned way!
Note from Love in Panels: Love Not Found is currently updated 3x/week with one print/PDF volume available. Patreon supporters get access to bonus content, as well.
LOVE NOT FOUND, by Gina Biggs, is a sci-fi romance set in a time when touching has become taboo. Main character Abeille (yes, that's French for "bee") is looking for something more than a pre-programmed session with a computer, so she sets out to find someone to "experiment" with.
LOVE NOT FOUND is beautiful. The setting is Monotropa, a planet advertised as "A Nature Lover's Paradise," so Biggs has populated it with interesting plants, dryads, and tropical weather patterns. I'm an avid gardener, so I'm surely biased, but the fact that several of the central characters are botanists is fresh and interesting. The color and costume choices are sweet and fun, and reflect the flower-ful setting in which the story takes place. Characters of all gender expressions often have flowers in their hair and wear clothes shaped like or inspired by plants. Much of the comic is in shades of pink, white, and brown, with pops of yellow, green, and (rarely) blue. It's an unabashedly feminine pallette that doesn't feel childish, but rather playful.
The characters are diverse and engaging, with only one recent addition I don't much care for. Abeille is from a planet called Pasque, which seems to be mostly a permafrost-type biome. We initially don't know much about her family, background, or reasons for emigrating to Monotropa, other than that she wants to plant a garden in memory of her sister. She works in the cafeteria of a company that engineers plants to resist the bugs on the planet. She appears to be white, with pink hair and dark pink eyes.
Miel (French for honey, yep) works as a "logger" at that same company. His job is to log details about various species, including growth and transplant results. If he was from Earth, we would say that his mothers are of South-Asian and African descent. (They're such a fun couple and when you meet them you'll "aww.") Miel is more reserved than Abeille, and their awkward flirting is sweet and feels honest.
Ivy (Abeille's best friend) and her partner, Holly, have an interesting secondary storyline. They're co-researchers at the aforementioned company, choosing to live together out of convenience and efficiency. None of that messy "romance" stuff. Their relationship evolves as Ivy sees Abeille's attitudes changing and begins to want something more for herself as well. Ivy eventually meets Aster, a nonbinary therapist who uses the pronouns Zie and Zer and isn't afraid of touch. Biggs has grown the comic to include many more secondary characters, like Clove, Abeille's coworker who has a speech impediment, and Botan, the foxy head gardener who falls for him.
LOVE NOT FOUND may be adorable, but it also touches on concepts of fidelity, intimacy, grief, taboos, societal and familial expectations, ecology, and the ways in which technology both connects and isolates us. It's worth a look for fans of sci-fi romance, gardening, and/or nuanced exploration of physical intimacy in relationships.
A note on the rating: This might be categorized as PG-13 by the movie world, but I've given it an R rating because a) I've read some of the NSFW bonus content and b) even though it's not visually explicit, there's a lot of talk (and some subtle depictions) of computer generated orgasms.
Gabe and Booker are just two normal college guys, sharing an apartment and failing spectacularly at love. But one day, a talking golf ball named Hal lands in their lives and offers them magical powers...and despite it being a terrible idea, Gabe signs up immediately! Now he must don the admittedly flattering dress of a Magical and fight for love and justice, while Booker, blinded by the sparkles, wants nothing to do with any of this. For fans of Cute High Earth Defense Club Love and Magical Girls-Slash-Dudes, this snarky comedy by Eurika Yusin Gho (eyugho) will blow a little magic up your skirt. Please note: Magical How? is recommended for readers aged 16+ due to crude language and adult topics.
It's Robin Hood like you've never seen him before, based on scholarly and historical speculation about what's really behind the outlaw's legend.
13th century England. Robert Godwinson, former lover of King Richard, lives with his band of Merry Men in Sherwood Forest, away from the watchful eye of Prince John, who has outlawed homosexuality. Though isolated, the men live in peace—that is, until a stranger enters their camp seeking aid for a nearby town besieged by the Sheriff of Nottingham. Robert—nicknamed Robin—is reluctant to help, but equally eager to get rid of this perplexing stranger... and to put his formidable bow-and-arrow to use. It's Robin Hood like you've never seen him before, based on scholarly speculation about what's really behind the outlaw's legend.
Meet Roger Hare. He's an up and coming novelist and single father of triplets. One night after a long trip he finds a man passed out in front of his apartment door and decides to bring him inside. What kind of sane person does that? Who's this mystery man and how much is he going to change Roger's life?