love and sex

Since romance comics had gone out of style well before I was born, I had no idea just how popular and prolific the genre had been. I had always assumed it was some kind of short-lived craze that fizzled out like other comic fads, but then I started noticing how high the issue numbers were on so many of the covers I selected. Turns out romance comics enjoyed an incredibly successful three-decade run from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. I also learned that the comic that launched the genre, 1947’s Young Romance, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby! You know, the guys that created Captain America a few years earlier. This was without question the easiest one of these galleries I’ve ever had to pull together, because almost every single cover I came across was a home run. They’re all just amazing! There was no sorting and sifting and really trying to get through all the underwhelming garbage to get to the good stuff. It’s all good stuff.

This week, since we're focusing on Love and Sex across the site, I thought it would be fun to cast Adam Warren's Empowered, a highly sexualized manga-influenced superhero comedy. The book's title character is a young superhero who gets her powers from an unbelievably skintight costume that has a tendency to get ripped up in battle, which often leads to her getting tied up, since she's powerless until the suit regenerates. Alongside her boyfriend, a former henchman known as Thug Boy, and her best friend Ninjette, she looks for her place in an absurd superhero world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Betty and Veronica lately. With Archie ‘n’ pals riding high in pop culture again thanks to Riverdale, it’s hard not to. Even with a faux-lesbian kiss that went nowhere, Riverdale reaffirms my belief that Betty and Veronica are totally in love. Hear me out.

It's Love & Sex Week here on ComicsAlliance and, while a quick glance at the internet will tell you there's a whole lot of anime that fit this subject, I decided to go with one that a) won't get me fired and b) is visually daring, funny, and occasionally just plain disgusting. Today, we're talking about Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt!!!

With the third volume out this month, Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love by Sarah Vaughn with art by Lan Medina can now be experienced in full, with a collected volume out this summer. The book is a perfect mix of Gothic romance, vintage haunted house movies, and classic DC super-horror, built around the character of Boston Brand, also known as Deadman. Deadman: Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love is the story of a woman named Berenice who faces a ghostly mystery even as she deals with her tumultuous love life, caught between her boyfriend and her nonbinary best friend. ComicsAlliance talked with Vaughn about the origins of the book, the blending of genres, and the importance of its queer lead characters.

If comics has taught us anything, it’s that anything can be illustrated, and if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that anything can be someone’s turn-on. Comics and furries go hand in hand, dating back farther than living memory, with modern furry fandom a direct multigenerational outgrowth of funny animal comics and cartoons. It’s Love and Sex Week here at ComicsAlliance, so we've decided to do our part to destigmatize furries, because we believe that everyone has at least one furry crush, whether it's the stars of Disney's Robin Hood, a Thundercat, or the stars of Disney's Zootopia. (We see you, Disney.) To that end, here are nine of our most animalistic passions from the world of comics.

The Archie comics were created to be a beautiful slice of old-school Americana, as homey as apple pie. But just like apple pie, people eventually found a dirtier way to enjoy them. The erotic comic series Cherry Poptart was created by cartoonist Larry Weitz in 1982 in a very conscious emulation of the style of Dan DeCarlo, the artist whose work set the standard for the Archie comics line. Cherry became a sort of XXX porn parody version; if you grew up lusting after Betty and Veronica, you could turn to these pages to see characters very like them having sex with each other.

The problem with "sexiest women in comics" lists is that they tend to get wrapped up in the presumptive male gaze and the assumption of a male readership. Basically, you end up with a bunch of sexist ideas about what men want women to be. So we wondered, what would such a list look like if the male gaze was taken out of the equation? We gathered some of our queer female and non-binary writers to nominate, vote for, and write up our own list of the hottest female characters in comics, from a queer perspective.

When I first jumped into the Batbooks early into the New 52, I was disappointed to learn that Barbara Gordon, my favorite superheroine, hadn’t had many love interests, and even less showing up in the new canon. How did a character so awesome, who had been around for so long, have so few romances over the years? I had started brainstorming who I would pair her with, and around that time I checked out the event comic Death of the Family. In the last issue, the Batfam had stopped the Joker, but they were all still coming down from the Joker toxin. While they were all sitting in a pool of water, grinning painfully against their wills, there was this one detail towards the back of the panel...

What if you were a big deal at your high school, but haunted by something you did as a kid? And what if you were a kid nobody noticed, but haunted by actual ghosts? And what if those two people were meant to be together? That's the story that drives the Korean webtoon Oh Holy.