Twisted Romance Volume 1 by Alex de Campi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Four stories of love and lust from comics’ coolest artists and writer ALEX DE CAMPI! First, a demon prowls the 1978 New York disco scene in Old Flames, drawn by KATIE SKELLY. Then, a curvy photographer’s assistant falls in love with someone way out of her league in Twinkle & The Star, with ALEJANDRA GUTIÉRREZ. A spacefleet captain captures a most infuriating pirate in Invincible Heart, with CARLA SPEED MCNEIL. And a princess runs away with a dragon in Treasured, with TRUNGLES.
Plus steamy prose romance stories from awesome folks like Magen Cubed and Vita Ayala, and more comics shorts about love from Meredith McClaren, Sarah Horrocks, Margaret Trauth and Sarah Winifred Searle.
Collects Twisted Romance #1-4.
This was quite an interesting anthology set – the common theme is a romance story with a twist, as suggested by the title, but the settings are all different. There’s an incubus-succubus story line which comes about from a professional breakup agency, a romance between a girl and her AI, a space pirate running off on a fleet captain after a kiss, a chubby girl who is in a relationship with an ace actor; most of the stories have a queer angle. The compilation of the stories is also interesting – each of the four issues has one prose story sandwiched between two comic shorts.
The artwork for each of the comic shorts is from a different artist, so sometimes it is a beautiful style and sometimes it doesn’t impress. There was one that made no sense at all, and another I had an issue with the lettering (try reading illegible font on a 7-inch tablet screen!); the prose were a good-length and had a magazine-like format with key quotes highlighted on every page. The style of the stories (prose or comic) all differs – and some of them can be explicit in terms of content while some are not (not recommended for younger teens!). It was an interesting set, and for the most part, I liked the stories, irrespective of artwork style.
Overall, an interesting anthology of romance stories in which there’s something for everyone.
Received an advance reader copy in exchange for a fair review from Image Comics, via Edelweiss.
YA on my Mind 
Queer comics and fluffy girls? Count me in! I wonder if buying this in a comics reader would make the writing more legible