[Note from Frolic: We are so excited to have blogger Suzanne Krohn guest post on the site today. Take it away Suzanne!]
Once upon the 1950’s-1970’s, romance comics were a big deal in the US comics world. Then they morphed into gothic/horror and haven’t come back in a significant way until recently. Comics fans who wanted a side of romance with their sequential art were left shipping uninvolved characters, pleading with Jessica Jones and Luke Cage to have actual on-the-page kisses, or scouring the internet for fan art. Unfortunately, lots of female characters in comics have been “fridged,” meaning they were introduced for a romantic arc, then killed off to give the male hero a deeper motivation. Not only were romance fans left without much romance, the ones we did get didn’t have Happily Ever Afters. Not cool.
In recent years, the field-leveling power of the internet has led to a blossoming romance genre in the world of comics. When I started Love in Panels, my goal was to build a database of romance comics, plus comics with a strong central romance and/or LGBTQ+ characters. At the time, the only things coming up when I searched “romance comics” on Google were references to the heyday of romance comics, or roundups of superhero comics with some occasional kisses.
I wanted stories that put the romance front and center. If you’re looking for the same, you’re in luck! For just about every type of romance novel you can imagine, there’s a romance comic.