Crave #1 teased an erotic thriller with a technological twist. Maria Llovett’s second issue follows through on this promise while leaving readers chomping at the bit for whatever is next. Fans of Llovett expect the artist to explore sinful themes with evocative, sensual art, and Llovett does just this with an erotic thriller for the digital age.
REVIEW: Girl Juice Is Every Roommate You Had in Your 20s
(or you are that roommate) The transition of a webcomic to print is always exciting for me; it often showcases how a cartoonist’s skills have improved over time, be they narrative, visual, or both. Even for veritable pros in comics, the tangible progression of a collected series shows off how artists experiment with new techniques,…
Octopus Pie Eternal: A Wibbly Wobbly Timeline
On November 23rd, Meredith Gran posed a question on Twitter: “Lately I’ve been wondering if I should draw more Octopus Pie as the characters age. I guess this is a typical dilemma for an artist: find a new conduit for exploring life as you live it, or risk turning the old one into a whole…
Catch These Hands! is a Sweet, Romantic Treat
If you were a Fruits Basket teen and felt that Arisa Uotani should’ve been queer, I’ve got good news for you! Catch These Hands! is here to grant your wish. Catch These Hands! finds Ayako Takebe, a former delinquent, lost in her adulthood. As a teen Takebe was one of the best fighters around, but…
REVIEW: Flung Out of Space Paints a Complex and Brilliant Portrait of Patricia Highsmith
I don’t have the right words to prepare you for this comic. At its simplest, Flung Out of Space is about Patricia Highsmith’s quest to escape the drudgery of writing comics and get her novels published, including Carol, considered the first lesbian romance with a happy ending. It’s also about her years-long attempt to try…
REVIEW: The Dreams of Queer Utopia Will Inspire You to Dream
In a pandemic, in a time of unrest, in a world that constantly keeps marginalized people in crisis, how do we imagine an ideal future? How do we look past the obstacles immediately in front of us and consider a happy, queer world? How do we dream? Editor and cartoonist H-P Lehkonen decided to create…
New Colors for Bug Boys and Witchlight Enrich their Stories
I’m a big fan of Czap Books, especially two of their earlier publications – Laura Knetzger’s sweet, slice-of-life series Bug Boys, and Jessi Zabarsky’s emotional, warm fantasy Witchlight. I’ve written about both comics before, but since those initial pieces both books were picked up by Random House Graphic and released to a wider audience. I…
Jane Mai’s Soft is a Brilliant Retelling of Carmilla
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains discussion of abusive relationships. When a friend recommended I watch a low budget webseries about a lesbian vampire who falls in love with her plucky college roommate, I didn’t realize it was based on Carmilla, a vampire novella by Sheridan Le Fanu older than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I was fascinated…
Normal Offers Queer, Desi Horror That Packs a Punch
The last Gaysi zine I reviewed was All that We Want, a gorgeous, warm celebration of queer desire. Their newest zine, Normal, is a complete departure from that exploration of queer joy, and instead dives into all that keeps us from such experiences. As Niyati Joshi makes known in their introduction, queer and trans people…
The Performative Horniness of Dawn of X
Adjoining bedrooms. That was all it took for the X-Men’s most infamous love triangle to suddenly become a canon poly triad in the minds of fans everywhere. Elsewhere in the same issue, we bore witness to Corsair’s partner hitting on Rachel Summers, his granddaughter, another character generally accepted as queer despite only the most subtextual…
Insta Made Me Read It: Scorching Romance and Let’s Play
Insta Made Me Read It is a twice-monthly column covering the webtoons advertised by LINE Webtoon on their Instagram account and on their app. The focus is on what’s both popular and encouraged to be popular by the publisher-platform itself. This time, I’ve been reading Scorching Romance and Let’s Play. Both are romance-themed comics with…
Good Sexual Citizenship Review: Great Ammo for the #MeToo Movement
Good Sexual Citizenship: How to Create a Sexually Safer World Ellen Friedrichs (Writer) Cleis Press September 24, 2019 We’re living in a #MeToo world where more people from marginalised communities are able to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault. Unfortunately, very few of the men accused of the crimes they have perpetrated will…