Thanks to Shop Your Shelves, I finally read Life of Melody, by Mari Costa. It's everything I hoped it would be.
A scholarly beast person and a failing fairy godfather meet in the woods when they separately follow the sound of a crying baby. Bon and Razzmatazz ("your name has four z's!") make bad first impressions, but they both want to take care of her so they make a deal to coparent. They pretend to be humans, taking on fake names to buy a dilapidated house and get jobs. Razzmatazz casts a fairy glamour for Bon. They bicker and have a couple of real fights, but like in the very best stories, the reader and author have an unspoken conversation about how foolish the characters are as they very clearly fall in love.
Costa builds up a lovely community around this family of three and the result is a wonderful, thoroughly developed queer romance that reads like a big hug. The art is stylized but not overly so, with a good balance of detail and whimsy. The colors are saturated and cozy, but the artist isn't afraid to pull out the vivid reds and black backgrounds when the Bleak Moment hits. Melody may be the glue that brings and holds the two main characters together, but the grind of raising an infant doesn't overwhelm the story. Instead, we get a little Black human bundle of cute who grows into a school-age kid thoroughly grossed out by the sight of her dads kissing.
Originally posted as a Patreon-exclusive webcomic, Life of Melody is available all over the place in print and ebook thanks to Hiveworks/Hivemill and Seven Seas. Not a romance, but my kids really liked Mari Costa's Paranorthern, too!
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