An ex-soldier joins a group of thieves in a desperate attempt to find a new home.
The Kalvivan thief system seem to have it all together, but when a band of outsider thieves appear, bent on wresting the city from the the system, will they be able to defend their own?
Queer themes.
Recommended rating 16+ for sexual content, language, violence and blood.
Ignatz Award winner Tillie Walden’s Spinning is a powerful graphic memoir that captures what it’s like to come of age, come out, and come to terms with leaving behind everything you used to know.
It was the same every morning. Wake up, grab the ice skates, and head to the rink while the world was still dark.
Weekends were spent in glitter and tights at competitions. Perform. Smile. And do it again.
She was good. She won. And she hated it.
For ten years, figure skating was Tillie Walden’s life. She woke before dawn for morning lessons, went straight to group practice after school, and spent weekends competing at ice rinks across the state. Skating was a central piece of her identity, her safe haven from the stress of school, bullies, and family. But as she switched schools, got into art, and fell in love with her first girlfriend, she began to question how the close-minded world of figure skating fit in with the rest of her life, and whether all the work was worth it given the reality: that she, and her friends on the team, were nowhere close to Olympic hopefuls. The more Tillie thought about it, the more Tillie realized she’d outgrown her passion—and she finally needed to find her own voice.
With a whopping 400 pages, this book is something of a coming-of-age tome. With a spare, sketchlike style, Tillie Walden tells the story of her life as an ice skating child and teen.
Chapters are named after skating moves, a short description of the action mirroring the events of the story. Through skating, we see Tillie's yearning for acceptance and love: from other girls, from her coaches, from her family, from herself. Walden doesn't shy away from showing us her first love, her bouts of depression, and an assault by her SAT tutor. She lets readers feel the fear, heartbreak, and relief that she experiences while coming out as a teen.
While I spent about half of the book wondering "why the hell is she still skating if it makes her this miserable," Walden does answer that question. The "why" is inextricably tied in with Tillie's own struggle with self-acceptance and her need for approval. Even when she's being bullied at school, at the rink, at home, she still tries to put on a smile and do what is expected of her. This pushes her through skating, through middle school, through concealing her first relationship.
This is not a book for answers, however. Tillie's not perfect and doesn't pretend to be. She acknowledges that she might have saved everyone a lot of trouble by quitting skating earlier, and that she relied on one of her skating friends for a lot of support and friendship that she never really reciprocated. Rather than providing answers, this memoir offers readers a chance to consider the sacrifices we make for the things we could leave behind, and the confusing freedom that comes from breaking with routine and stepping into the unknown.
In this rollicking queer western adventure, acclaimed cartoonist Melanie Gillman (Stonewall Award Honor Book As the Crow Flies) puts readers in the saddle alongside Flor and Grace, a Latinx outlaw and a trans runaway, as they team up to thwart a Confederate plot in the New Mexico Territory. When Flor—also known as the notorious Ghost Hawk—robs the stagecoach that Grace has used to escape her Georgia home, the first thing on her mind is ransom. But when the two get to talking about Flor's plan to crash a Confederate gala and steal some crucial documents, Grace convinces Flor to let her join the heist.
Liz, trying to get rid of her writer's block, gets caught up in the weirdness surrounding the nurse she interviewed.
From Volume 1:
A companion book to both Sunstone and Swing, Sugar is about a couple who embark on a relationship that starts as more of an arrangement and ends with them falling in love...but that love has consequences! Julia works three jobs and is trying to finish college in her early 20's. John is recently divorced, still stinging from that breakup and trying to start anew. Neither has ever done anything like this before and the emotional swings they face challenge what could be a perfect match.
A bisexual, polyamorous love story for the modern era. Hazel is already in a happy relationship when she meets Argent, a dominatrix who’s sweet and tender outside of the bedroom. Sugar Town is a fun, colorful comic about a young woman’s journey through the delights and disappointments of multiple lovers.
Sugartown is, I believe intentionally, hard to categorize. The main character, Hazel, is in an open relationship with Gregor. She's in Portland, OR for the summer, while Gregor is back home in NYC. She meets a super-cute domme, Argent, at a club one night, and the two strike up a friendship/relationship.
The book explores themes of jealousy, long-distance relationships, communication, and queer friendship, but none in depth. The art is super cute, but the writing is a little stilted, almost as if the creator was trying to say a lot in not a lot of pages. I've listed it as "definitely a romance," since Hazel and Argent are in a relationship by the end of the book, with I-Love-Yous and so on. I believe that Hazel's relationship with Gregor also deepens and evolves throughout the book. As for sexiness, there's some mild nudity and sexual situations, but that's it. I gave it an R simply for a flogging scene, otherwise it'd be PG-13.
The entire thing is broken up into four mini-issues, each around 15 pages. The entire book is 52 pages, including title and so on. This wouldn't be a problem, if not for the fact that the book ends up at $10. I understand that indie comics are most costly to produce, but the insides weren't oustanding enough for me to recommend it to my readers at that price. If you find it on sale, go right ahead!
Two women deal with modern themes of sex, relationships, and fetishism in this erotic romantic comedy. So beware all who enter, because, to quote a few hundred thousand readers on DeviantArt: "I'm not into BDSM...but this story...I get it."
Cartoonist Meredith McClaren (Hinges) tells five short, sexy stories featuring superheroes, supervillains, sidekicks, and the people who love them.
Showing consent and character-driven erotic relationships, Super Fun Sexy Times answers the age-old question: what happens when the mask comes off?
Two sidekicks on opposite sides get stuck in an underground lab together, and find a great way to pass the time. A tactician and superhero discuss their desires, limits, and kinks before their first time, and perhaps get a little too excited in the process. A pair of supervillains explore gender and sex together, while growing closer in their relationship. Lesbian heroes try out a kinky rolepaying scenario, and discover how to make it work for both of them. And an exhausted assassin relaxes after a long day with the kind (yet firm) attentions of his husband.
Told with care, sex-positivity, and humor, and featuring a wide variety of sexualities and bodies, Super Fun Sexy Times aims to create an erotic reading experience that lives up to its name!
Spinning of from the universe of Sunstone comes a slice of life romantic story about a couple trying to regain the sexual energy from the beginning of their relationship by swinging with other couples. An emotional journey of two people fighting to stay in love.
I really wanted to love SWING. I adored SUNSTONE and was ready for more of the humor, emotional depth, and romance. Unfortunately, Linda Sejic's lovely art couldn't save the awkward writing and construction of this first volume of SWING.
(If you want to read more about the series and the writing team, we interviewed writer Matt Hawkins in May 2018.)
The book is 132 pages, but only the first 100 are the actual story. The backmatter is cluttered with an excerpt from another Sejic project, BLOODSTAIN, and a bunch of information on swinging. How to get into it, the pro's and con's, resources, etc. This is all well and good, but the BLOODSTAIN excerpt comes before the info on swinging, which doesn't make sense. (Perhaps this will be different in the final version?) The book also opens with an extremely awkward two page sex scene written as prose. It's so clinical that any emotion or arousal the writer wanted to elicit is completely lost. [Then he went down on her and we watched. After a minute, I asked her how she wanted it and she said 'doggie' and I f*cked her for a few minutes.] It's just... awkward. Leave it out next time, please. That opening isn't billed as a preface or an intro to swinging, either, though it's clearly intended as such.
It was a relief to finally get to the actual comic, which is much better than the intro. We're led through the two main characters meeting in college, getting together, and then the next eight years of their lives before they find themselves in a romantic and sexual rut. They then try out a swinging club (with a genuinely funny attempt at oral) and the book ends with the heroine inviting her best friend over for a threesome, which goes well. Then... the book is over.
I understand that the series will continue, but I'm not sure that I'll continue with it. I'm so desperate for romance comics that are sex-positive and beautifully illustrated that I very well may, however. This book is both of those things, but the writing is stilted, jumps around, and could have used an editor or a couple of beta readers who read within the genre.
Switch is a superhero, but he doesn't enjoy it. Between the struggle to uphold his mother's legacy and dealing with the hassle of being a celebrity hero, he feels pretty bad about the whole job. Things are going as well as can be expected until events surrounding the release of a new technology start to change everything.