As I’ve mentioned before, I love a Mills & Boon romance. Or Harlequins as you Americans call them. Because apparently you want your generic romance books to have a slightly glamorous name rather than sounding like minor characters in a police procedural drama or a firm of unsuccessful Estate Agents.
I’m also a big fan of comics. Or graphic novels if you’re the sort of person who gets embarrassed about that sort of thing. So, comics, then.
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| I talk about my masturbation habits at great length, after all. I’m not going to get embarrassed by reading picture books on the train. |
So when I found out that there was a whole slew of comic books based on Harlequin romance novels, I was absolutely delighted. No, wait, not delighted. What’s that other word? Baffled. That’s it.
Is there a huge market for this sort of thing? I would have thought that the crossover on the whole Mills & Boon / comics love was fairly minimal. Are they making the things just for me?
In which case you’d think that they’d try a bit harder. Firstly by making them available for a version of the Kindle that I actually have and secondly by not making them so unutterably shit.
They’re awful. The illustrations mostly seem to have been slapped together by people with no discernable talent for drawing and a really short deadline.
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| A Date with a Billionaire: Girl being hectored by a massive killer doll. Possibly. Or a badly drawn middle-aged woman. |
They’re probably not written for me though. They clearly seem to be made by and marketed at the Japanese market. Maybe they have more of a tolerance for hastily cobbled together slapdash stuff like this. There certainly seems to be a lot of it.
You know what though? I’d hate there to be some kind of romance book trend that I’m not part of. Maybe I should start work on the comic book versions of my spanky romance books. Given the standard of the competition, I ought to be able to knock something up in half an hour or so.
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| Looks like your inflatable woman is deflating there, squire. |
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| Public Wife Private Mistress: “All we had was legally recognized sex.” That old chestnut. |