Chemistry has always been difficult to describe in words, and romance readers are increasingly turning to the graphic novel format, for its engaging blend of prose and illustrations. The massive popularity of series such as Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper and Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus are evidence that graphic novels are offering readers a refreshing way to dip into the genre. This spring, teens will see plenty of new romance graphic novels that span tropes and subgenres hitting shelves. We spoke with the creators of six forthcoming projects that display how the medium might just be the new literary fix for lovers of love.
Dream on
Two of the season’s romance graphic novels offer escapes into dream worlds. Sophia Glock’s Before We Wake (Little, Brown Ink, Feb.), tells the tale of teen Alicia, who accidentally uncovers the power (and consequences) of lucid dreaming when she begins falling for her best friend’s boyfriend via interconnected dreams. Glock, who considers herself “a big sucker for clichés,” was excited to lean into the challenge of crafting a story that combines the paranormal with romance. “It’s quite challenging to write a good love story or a good ghost story when that’s your explicit goal,” she says. “You find out how complex these things that we reduce to mere genre actually are.”
Glock lost her father in 2020 and became interested in dreams and their meanings. While working on the story, loss and love emerged as inseparable themes. “The love story is actually just a way for us to understand our main character, Alicia, as she figures out her place in the world,” she says. “It’s a way to talk about everything else this girl has experienced in loss.”
The author say she’s eager to see a “shift back toward the fantasy of romance” in a culture that tends to trivialize love stories. “I think that young people need more road maps to how to fall in love.”
Jennifer Lee also takes a dreamy approach to grappling with loss in her graphic novel As I Dream of You (First Second, May), illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist LeUyen Pham. Lee, best known as one of the directors and screenwriters of Frozen, is no stranger to the power of visual storytelling. As I Dream of You began as a screenplay before she pitched it as a book. The concept made its way to Mark Siegel at First Second, and after discussing how the idea could work in the graphic novel format, Lee pivoted once more.
As I Dream of You centers around teens Franny and Sam, who start off as cynics due to their difficult home lives but find themselves falling for one another. When death comes calling, however, they discover a dreamscape that keeps them together.
The star-crossed journey of Orpheus and Eurydice from Greek mythology was a major inspiration for Lee, and raised the question of whether love truly can conquer all. “I always found it to be a really powerful story,” Lee says. “It’s about the greatest power of love, and seeing if it can survive, through the greatest separation, and how our own human strengths and failures get in the way of that.”
The intimacy of dreams lends itself well to the romance genre, where vulnerability is key to the story line. In both stories, across reality and fantasy, what remains foundational is how the characters reach out to one another.
At the conclusion of Before We Wake, Glock says, “you’re actually left wondering how paranormal it really is. How much of this is an explicit magic and how much of this is an emotional magic?”
Take two
Shared history can be difficult to get over. Just ask the stars of Miles Toriko Burks’s debut graphic novel, Encore! (HarperAlley, June). In it, high school theater kid Clay navigates the return of his former best friend Aron after Aron ghosted him years before.
Burks got his start in graphic novels creating fan art comics for his favorite shows such as Voltron and Homestuck, and in 2020 made the shift to Webtoon, a global platform for manga, comics, and manhwa. Encore! originally began on Webtoon and was picked up by Rose Pleuler in 2022 to take the story from digital to print.
For Burks there was an “escapist” joy in “writing a story about a character who looked like me and shared in my transness, getting a love story with a character I would’ve wanted to be with.”
At the core of Burks’s debut is a rekindled friendship, placing it firmly under the second-chance-romance umbrella—a trope the author frequently found himself returning to. “One thing I really like about second-chance romance is seeing how much characters change over time,” Burks says. “You get a time jump, and then this person is so different, but in a lot of ways they’re still the same.”
For Clay and Aron, getting over their preconceived notions of one another is the true battle they’ll need to face in order to move forward. “I definitely like to explore the way that nostalgia clouds your judgment,” Burks says. “It was fun to explore my own life and go back to the past and ask myself, Why did me and my friend fall apart? with a little bit more understanding.”
Thankfully, Clay and Aron are able to reconnect and find a happily ever after.
Adeline Kon grapples with a more contentious version of a shared past in their graphic novel debut, Just Between Us (Dial, Feb.). When figure skater Lydia Chen’s skating competitor Elaine begins training at her rink, Lydia learns to work past their rivalry in exchange for a blossoming friendship.
Kon was able to see the romance of the story in the sport it’s inspired by: figure skating. Kon, who fell in love with figure skating while watching the 2018 Winter Olympics, recognized a certain enchantment between performer and spectator that mirrors romance. “You as a person are on center stage, and you are reaching to the audience, trying to express something to them through performance,” she says. “But also, as an athlete, you’re trying your hardest to make these jumps. I like the dichotomy.”
The author also enjoys the intense focus that the romance genre offers, by homing in on the interiority of two characters. “I’ve always liked character-focused stories, and I feel like romance lends itself to that really easily,” she says.
According to Kon, much of the romance in Just Between Us stems from the characters’ inescapable rivalry, which bleeds into all aspects of their lives. “I wanted Elaine and Lydia to have a magnetic relationship, both on and off the ice,” she explains. “It is a romantic relationship, but it is also a story about two people desperately trying to understand each other.”
Sometimes words can’t say it all, which is the allure of the romance graphic novel—the way the art can speak for the moments that require a pause. “I think really big or even small romantic moments can feel more special and beautiful and emotional because of the drawings,” Kon says. “That’s the beauty of showing those relationships on a page.”
Spring awakenings
The stars of The Kiss Bet, Vol. 3 by Ingrid Ochoa (Webtoon Unscrolled, Feb.) and Forgive-Me-Not by Mari Costa (First Second, Apr.) are having two very different kinds of awakenings. Ochoa’s star, Sara Lin, is dealing with the aftermath of her first kiss, while Costa’s titular protagonist, Forgive-Me-Not, discovers her true identity as the heir to a throne.
Costa, who got her start in the comics world on Webtoon, has long been a fan of the romance genre for its reliability and comfort, especially growing up in what she found was a comics world that felt more “action adventure forward.” She says, “Romance has always been part of my work, one way or the other.”
Romantic possibility is the immediate draw of her latest work, which follows two characters for whom love should be off the table. Upon learning that she was switched at birth and is not in fact fae but the true heir to the seelie kingdom, Forgive-Me-Not must bring the impostor princess Aisling back to the fae in order to take her place. And so the journey begins.
For both Aisling and Forgive-Me-Not, there are plenty of identity shifts that summon the familiar adolescent feeling of navigating who one really is for the first time. “I needed to think about what I was like at the time,” Costa says of writing for a YA audience. “All the heightened emotions and reactions that you end up having. Your life is changing and you don’t know what’s going on.”
Forgive-Me-Not grapples with whether returning Aisling to the fae against her wishes in order to get what she wants is truly the best path forward—a major first for Forgive-Me-Not, whose determination is a defining character trait. As the tale proves, sometimes all one needs is a bit of time, which the graphic novel format can offer its characters.
“One of my favorite things in romance comics is how you can have that organic development that would take a while to describe in prose,” Costa says. “It’s a little bit easier to believe when you’ve got one page with time passing, where the characters are getting to know each other. If you’re reading that in a novel, you’re like, No, I wanted to see that in more detail.”
Similar to Burks, Ochoa started The Kiss Bet on Webtoon and transitioned to traditional publishing. The series centers around Sara Lin, whose romantic life is kick-started when she agrees to a dare by her friend Patrick to have her first kiss with a stranger. Reluctant to throw away a major milestone, Sara attempts to find the right guy to share her first kiss with, and winds up with more options than she expects.
The digital-to-physical pipeline is a bright spot, according to Ochoa, who has noticed audience preferences for analog and tangible media. “There’s something about physical books that we all crave,” Ochoa says. “I think we’re all going back to older times where we can physically own things, because now we have to rent or subscribe to everything. Owning my own books, being able to hold them in my own hands, it just feels so beautiful.”
Sara’s first kiss isn’t the only first she’s facing. In previous installments, Sara has had to come to terms with her crushes not adding up to what she wants in real life, a disappointment that every young person deals with at some point. “A big part of volume three is Sara realizing that sometimes you can finally get what you wanted for years—and still wonder if it’s happening too late,” Ochoa says.
She explains that she recognizes how relatable Sara’s triumphs and failures are because she’s been through them herself. “At first I wrote The Kiss Bet in secret. And now I get a lot of people writing to me, saying, Oh, this feels so realistic and relatable.”
Whether the characters are navigating major firsts, a complicated past, or dreams that offer refuge, YA romance graphic novels fill a demand for stories that blend prose with unique visual storytelling. It’s a format that continues to grow, thanks to both digital spaces and communities, and the embracing of traditional publishing.
Romance can feel like it’s the start and end of the world when one is young. But Ochoa has advice that can apply to both romance graphic novels and love in general: “Just enjoy it.”
