PRIDE MONTH 2025! A Wave Blue World’s queer comics anthologies have garnered deserved critical acclaim in recent times. Indeed they have also become a staple of our annual Pride Month coverage with a review of The Color of Always here in 2023 and the Broken Frontier Award-nominated Becoming Who We Are: Real Stories About Growing Up Trans here last year. This month they publish Young Men in Love: New Romance (edited by Joe Glass and Matt Miner), another volume of stories on gay relationships, with an impressive creative line-up, leaning heavily into that subtitle.
The key thing to note about this latest collection of tales is that Young Men in Love: New Romance is not an anthology focussing solely on slice-of-life material. Instead, it’s a genre-crossing book that includes horror, science fiction, fantasy and even a some super-heroes thrown in for good measure. It makes for a heady mix, and the self-contained nature of each strip ensures accessibility.
There are the best part of thirty creators across fourteen offerings here so the usual proviso that the small number of stories mentioned here are the ones that stood out for me. But different readers will find different hooks to connect them to each short. David Hazan and Noah Dao’s ‘Lovers True’ (above) uses its fantasy trappings as metaphor as we discover the truth behind the plight of two eternally bound guardians of a mystical portal and how their relationship led them here. Dao’s fluid art is enhanced in terms of the atmospheric by Lucas Gattoni’s lettering which emphasises the fantasy elements of the story to great effect. In fact Gattoni’s contributions are exemplary throughout.
Joe Glass and Gavin Mitchell give us ‘Blazing Ahead’ wherein Drake and Sam, two young super-heroes from a familiar kind of academy realise in the heat of battle that their assumptions about each other have been at odds with reality. Mitchell’s dynamic art is counterpointed by his ability to bring the quieter, more reflective scenes of Glass’s script to life. Joe Corallo and Chase Bluestone’s ‘Boys Will Be Toys’ (below) finds a different angle on the book’s premise when Ricky Rifle, a new action figure in a young boy’s bedroom, becomes the object of desire of Franklin Farmer, a longer-term toy resident. It’s a witty, delightful story with a beautiful finale, and Bluestone captures the contrasting elements of slapstick and poignancy with equal aplomb.
The most notable entry in the “language of comics” category is ‘Dinner for Two’ written by Al Ewing, layouts by Luciano Vecchio, and finished art by Patricio Oliver. It’s the book’s strongest story, a random encounter between two men in a supermarket leading to romance. The key here is that it’s told without words, dialogue in speech balloons replaced by symbols, and the melting, dreamy art being particularly eye-catching. In David M. Booher and Ilias Kyriazis’s ‘The Spark’ (below) the last ride on a fair’s rollercoaster is the catalyst for something beautiful as two young men, Tank and Jason, connect in an unlikely moment. Booher’s story is a rewarding character piece about the potential of love with Kyriazis’s art and colour choices imbuing the fairground with an almost magical quality.
Young Men in Love: New Romance, is engaging, eloquent and bursting with human interest. A Wave Blue World continue to publish some of the most vibrant queer comics work on the shelves.
Greg Anderson Elysée, Chase Bluestone, David Booher, David Brame, Bradley Clayton, Joe Corallo, Josh Cornillon, Noah Dao, Al Ewing, Giopota, Joe Glass, David Hazan, Auguste Kanakis, DJ Kirkland, Konner Knudsen, Ilias Kryriazis, Xavier Lavagnino, Jarrett Melendez, Lucas Gattoni, Matt Miner, Anthony Oliveira, Patricio Oliver, Jacoby Salcedo, Hamish Steele, Daryl Toh, Josh Trujillo and Luciano Vecchio • A Wave Blue World, $19.99
Review by Andy Oliver
