Fresh Romance
In the 1940s, romance comics were big business, offering emotionally heightened but chaste tales of young love and providing a valuable training ground for legends such as Marvel mascot Stan Lee and Captain America creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. By the 1960s, superheroes had started to muscle in on the market, beginning their long, unstoppable march to cultural dominance, but it turns out there’s still an appetite for comics where most of the excitement comes from characters hitting on each other rather than just hitting.
Fresh Romance is a monthly anthology that channels the swooning spirit of those vintage comics with a 21st-century sensibility. The serialised stories are sophisticated, sensual and LGBT-friendly, including an Archie-style US high-school drama enlivened by magical goings-on and an exquisitely illustrated Regency-era story about a nervous young bride shipped off to her new husband’s gloomy country pile.
Issue four, available at the end of this month, promises the first in a new series of sex columns and even some male nudity, still a rarity in the cheesecake world of mainstream comics. Love must be in the air, though: Marvel, currently halfway through Secret Wars, a blockbuster event that has sucked all their heroes and villains into one giant dimensions-spanning mega-story, will publish a one-off issue called Secret Love on Wednesday. As well as a Roy Lichtenstein-inspired cover, it boasts various torrid tales of forbidden romance across the Secret Wars battlefield, including handsome Daredevil Matt Murdock getting caught up in a lethal love triangle.
Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl
In the world of Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl, music is magic. That’s a pretty relatable concept – hearing a certain pop song can flood your brainpan with unbidden emotions, compelling you to dance or bang your head against a wall depending on the association. In the mid-2000s, writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie took that idea and weaponised it, imagining UK clubbers and scenesters forming covens to attain the supernatural power of the Phonomancer: literally, a wizard on the decks. Despite being steeped in Britpop, the first two volumes established the pair as in-demand creators in the US (Gillen now writes the official Darth Vader comic; McKelvie envisioned an incredible redesign of Captain Marvel that will likely be on the big screen in the next three years).
But after a five-year break they’ve returned to the property that made their name, buoyed by the success of their recent creator-owned hit The Wicked + The Divine, an absurdly stylish comic that plausibly imagines pop stars as reincarnated gods. The first issue of The Immaterial Girl, published by Image Comics last week, explores a Faustian pop pact through arcane fire and the visual language of 1980s music videos. It also digs deeply and affectingly into Taylor Swift, Sugababes and early Blur, and features a glossary that helpfully explains what electroclash is/was.
Doctor Who Comics Day
For the past year, there have been three separate Doctor Who monthly comics, each focusing on a different incarnation of the universe’s oldest and scattiest science superhero. But to mark Doctor Who Comics Day today – yet more proof that many doctors work weekends – UK-based publisher Titan have launched a new mini-series called Four Doctors. The five-part weekly comic unites the Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors (if you struggle to keep track, that’s Ferrety Broadchurch, Bow-Tied Easter Island Head and Angry Scottish Eyebrows) and adds John Hurt’s mysterious War Doctor to the mix.
So far, Four Doctors feels like a knowing tribute to the team-up tradition established long before the modern TV reboot, where ownership of a Tardis allowed various versions of the galloping Gallifreyan to skip outside linear time and interact directly with each other in fun, feature-length specials such as The Five Doctors. It’s also written by Paul Cornell, a veteran of the TV show who has also written for both Marvel and DC, expertly wrangling Wolverine, Lex Luthor and others. The prognosis? Good.
