Last year, I decided to list off my five favorite queer/romance comics of the year, and people had reactions. So let's do it again!
Did I read everything that came out this year? Nope. Are these totally subjective? Yep.
That said, I'd love to hear your faves from 2018!
Catching up? So far, we've published an intro post, a terminology post, a post on comics creation, a piece on managing your budget, some starter comics, and the Local Comic Shop experience. Last week we went through some of the digital funding and distribution channels, which essentially wrapped up the "education" part of this series.
Now we get to talk about something really fun: dirty comics. These are the comics that you probably won't be reading at work, on the subway, or around your kids. These are the comics you aren't supposed to read unless you are 18 or over, so here's me saying that if you are younger than 18, don't click through.
Unnatural is an erotic dystopian mystery comic with anthropomorphized animals and more than one sinister organization. There's a lot going on in the four issues that comprise this first volume, out November 21st.
This comic is trying to kill me, I swear. In the best way, of course.
Norroway is a retelling of the Scottish folktale, The Black Bull of Norroway, and it's thoroughly entrancing. This series has changed a few details and expanded the story, but you can read the original here.
Reviewing is subjective and I'm not exactly shy with my opinions on this here site, so I'll just say it: Twisted Romance was not for me. I didn't like the format, which mainly consisted of one longer comic, one short comic, and one piece of prose per issue. Each piece is not connected by artist, writer, or topic. This combined with the fact that there were four issues in the volume made for a very fractured reading experience. I couldn't settle into any of the stories, and several of them didn't feel like romance at all. I'm sure that a large part of this is because I read genre romance and expect that happily-ever-after, but I was only satisfied with maybe two of the stories in this entire collection.
Remember when we talked about Circadia? The fantasy romance comic series about a ballerina and a nonbinary assassin? It's back!
Body Music is the sort of project that's hard to place in one category. It's a series of vignettes, some connected, some not. Some of the stories are romantic, some are decidedly not. Some of the stories are queer, some are straight, some are monogamous, some are polyamorous. Some of the stories are really quite short, a couple meander around a bit.
If you've read our review of Persephone, you can probably guess that I'm a huge fan of Persephone retellings. If you haven't, well... I am a huge fan of Persephone retellings. Is it the original Bad Boy story? Maybe. But there's something more to be explored in retellings. In most of these stories, Persephone isn't trapped in the underworld when she eats pomegranate seeds, she makes a choice, and it's that agency, her claiming of her own body and sexuality, that pulls me like a magnet to these tales.
