Fancy Dress

I like all kind of comics, not just romance ones. The first comics I read were super-hero, and I still read a lot of them today. At their best, they're very entertaining. Challenging, even. At their worst, they are juvenile or just plain boring.

But, for the most part, that's what we have with comic books today. While there are many publishers out there that don't touch the super-hero genre with a ten-foot pole, the two biggest (Marvel and DC) publish dozens of titles each month featuring your favorite costumed crime-fighter.

And super-heroes (likely because that's all that are out there) seeped into other genres. You don't publish a Western any more. You publish a Western with people who can shoot ray-beams out their eyes. You don't publish a sci-fi comic. You publish a sci-fi comic that has some bizarre, and likely dubious, tangental relationship with super-heroes of the past.

And you can't publish a romance comic without there being something involving super-heroes. (DC had a series out a few years ago called Young Heroes in Love. It wasn't particularly good. Even Marvel's recent Mary Jane series -- which I enjoyed -- had to have Spider-Man in them. A real shame.)

So it's not unexpected to find a series like Love in Tights, which ran (as best I can determine) 6 issues, from late 1998 to 2000. The anthology was edited by J. Torres, who's gone on to do a lot of work for DC and others, including some of their underrated Johnny DC titles, and assistant edited by B. Clay Moore (who's also gone on to bigger things comics-wise, including writing Hawaiian Dick).

I bought the first two issues at the recent Wizard World Chicago convention, and I sat down last night to read them. Anthologies are a tough sell, because often times one really bad story can ruin an entire book, and if there isn't a focused direction to be found, things can go awry rather quickly.

That's sort of what happened with issue #1. There are 4 short stories in the issue, and a few 1-page gags, but none of them are very fulfilling. The best of the bunch is Takeshi Miyazawa's "Crash Course", a story where two young lovers get accosted by a group of thugs, and while the boy faints from the pressure, the gal shows off her super-powers and beats the bad guys to a pulp. The art's solid, the story's okay (if not a little thin), but it seems like there's a lot missing. The other stories are very much slice-of-life tales involving either falling in love with a super-hero (J. Torres and Francis Manapul's "While You Were Sleeping") or being a super-hero and falling in love (Torres, B. Clay Moore, and Brian Clopper's "Fatal Hesitation" and Justin Steiner and Rick Cortes's "Fast Girl"). But they're not really stories. There is no progression; there is no plot. Things just happen, someone is heart-broken, and then everything ends.

With romance stories (I think much more than with action ones), there must be an emotional resonance. It's much more important to feel what the characters feel, show some sort of empathy, than just have a little twist ending. Nothing in Love in Tights #1 did that.

(And look, I'm not sure if I ever feel much empathy for the girls in Young Romance or True War Romance. But it would be nice if it came close.)

The second issue, however, was a big improvement. Of the five stories in the issue, only "The Caped and the Cowled", a soap-opera spoof, really dropped the ball. Perhaps it was because two of the stories were done with established characters (Randy Renaldo's "The Real Julianne Love", featuring the Rob Hanes Adventures cast, and Steve Conley's "Made for Each Other", featuring Astounding Space Thrills' Argosy Smith). But more than not, they're romance stories (which feature deception, hope, love at first sight) with just a touch of super-heroics.

The last story is "Another Perfect Wedding" by Randy Lander and Steve Remen, a take on the super-hero wedding which we've seen a lot in "serious" super-hero comics, but it works here on funny level (although not much love).

If the second issue was on par with the first, I doubt if I would've looked for the other 4, but as it is, I'll search out and try to find them. I noticed that a couple have covers and stories by Andi Watson (who I really like), so that's certainly an incentive. I think Torres quickly realized that the best romance stories involving super-heroes are better off featuring love than tights.