Twisted Romance issue two is out February 14th from Image Comics, and Monkeys Fighting Robots has your exclusive first-look at the book.
Written by Alex de Campi and illustrated by a rotating team of artists, Twisted Romance is “a four-issue weekly anthology miniseries with tales of love—love gone right, wrong, and everything in between.” Each issue will be 48 pages long, and will feature a main comic story, a backup comic story, and a prose story.
“Romance comics were such a huge staple of the sequential market throughout the golden and silver ages, with ur big masc faves like Jack Kirby, Joe Simon and Stan Lee regularly working on DC and Marvel books with titles like Our Love Story,” says de Campi. “John Romita Sr: co-created the Punisher; also drew kissy-girl books. But then when comics moved out of newsstands and lost a large part of its female readership, we got this straight-white-boys’ club attitude, which is both historically inaccurate to the medium, and woefully ignorant of the tremendous buying power of women, PoC, and/or LGBTQIA audiences.”
“When you ignore a market, it takes its dollars elsewhere,” she continues. “Mostly to prose romance, and to fanfic (where fics often have far greater readership than the ‘official’ published stories, and are in most cases better written). So it was kind of a no-brainer for me to look around and be like, this is a book I want to read, nobody is making it at a big indie or mainstream publisher; I will force it into existence by the sheer power of will and eating too much sugar late at night. Whatever you like in terms of romance stories, however you identify, we probably have a story you’ll dig, made with or by someone who looks / identifies like you. Because this is the new club, it looks different from the old club, and it’s way more badass.”
Issue two, “Twinkle and the Star”, is illustrated by Alejandra Gutiérrez (Love is Love), with the backup comic by Meredith McClaren (HINGES), and the prose story by Vita Ayala (Batman Beyond).
“Being the comics baby of the bunch, I’m really excited for people to see the fun world we’re creating,” said Gutiérrez. “Honey, get into this boots-the-house-down realness for your nerves!”
About the comic:
Beauty is business as usual for fashion photographer’s assistant Twinkle Johar until she meets and accidentally falls for a shy Hollywood actor during a shoot. Is he using her? Or can a girl like her really end up with a guy like him?
Take a sneak peek at five finished pages from the issue below:
“Twinkle and the Star” comes out on Valentine’s Day, February 14th; pre-order it at your local comic shop today using Diamond code DEC170608 (final order cutoff is January 22nd).
EW.com already has your first-look at Twisted Romance issue one, in stores February 7th. SYFY Wire and The A.V. Club will have your previews of issues 3 and 4 on January 22nd and January 29th, respectively.
