It’s almost there now Saint Valentine and the time has come to organize the most romantic day of the year down to the last detail. Celebrating the February 14th, we are still in the middle of the winter season therefore between short and cold days, sometimes the best thing to do is stay at home in the warmth reading a good comic perhaps in the company of your soul mate. We have already created a special article for you regarding the manga, but now let’s go see the western comics together that we absolutely recommend you read on this special day. It’s not a ranking of the best comics ever, but our personal list that goes from the world of fantasy to more authorial and perhaps little-known stories and will treat love at 360 degrees, even rediscovering the more negative, but natural sides.
Valentine’s Day: comics for lovers’ day
Saga
Saga tells the true love with all its ups and downs retracing both joys and sorrows. It is a Fantasy, but the story is so well done and realistic that it is also very intimate and human and often touches the reader’s strings because it shows what happens to everyone at least once. The protagonists are Marco and Alana, two warriors of different races who found themselves fighting for opposing sides in a millennial war. Marko, in fact, is a soldier of the people of the horns, inhabitant of the moon of Wreath, while Alana belongs to the people of the wings, of the planet Landfall.
The two races have been at war for many years, but at one point they decided to fight together to protect the family they are building. The oldest story in the world, boy meets girl, is declined in a new way, epic in one space opera with deeply heartfelt tones from Brian K. Vaughanformer author of works such as Y, The last man and Ex Machina.
Saga is available for purchase online
Despite it all
There life goes in a specific direction. From A to Z, from beginning to end. This story, on the other hand, goes the other way around, from the Z of Zeno, bookseller, dreamer, eternal student, to the A of Ana, a sixty-year-old who has been mayor of her town for a lifetime, and now she is ready to start living for real. We meet them at the beginning of the story who find themselves, after years, as excited as kids.
We find them, at the end of the book, meeting for the first time, because in this book of Jordi Lafebre the chapters are numbered from 20 to 1, and the love story of Ana and Zeno is told in reverse order, but if the years decrease, as the reading proceeds the emotions increase. A perfect storywho knows how to tell the complex joints of the heart and two lives that intertwine, seek each other, in what is perhaps one of the most romantic comics you can read on Valentine’s Day.
Nonetheless, it is available for purchase online
Blankets
We’re talking about a love story like you’ve never seen before. An autobiographical graphic novel in which Craig Thompson starts from his childhood in Wisconsin to tell us about his family life and his relationship with religion, up to the meeting with Raina: love then explodes with all its strength, surprising the protagonist and involving readers in a river of emotions as passionate as they are literaryly mature.
The feelings described are both passionate and mature, but what is most striking are the drawings and the story capable of making the author win awards of the caliber of the Harvey Awards, the Eisner Awards and the Ignatz Awards. Also in 2005 Blankets was selected by Time as one of the top 10 graphic novels published in English from 1923 to 2005.
Blankets is available to purchase online
The taste of chlorine
“Are you there next Wednesday?”. Every week a boy and a girl get together in the pool. The first chance meeting little by little it becomes a fixed appointment. It is understood that both have still open wounds that they do not want to talk about. Meanwhile, tub after tub, stroke after stroke, they get to know each other, converse, begin to open up to each other. A dance of movements, looks and feelings that proceeds delicately and poetically, between the lights and the blue-green of the water, up to an unexpected turning point.
Also in this case we are talking about a comic that has won several awards, such as the Revelation prize at the Angoulême Festivalin 2009, and the Attilio Micheluzzi award “Best foreign cartoon” at the Comicon of Naples, in 2010. Awards that assume even more importance if we consider that at the time of the production of the work the author, Bastien Vives, was just 24 years old. In short, it is a pearl among the various international comics that we recommend you read on Valentine’s Day and beyond.
Chlorine Taste is available to purchase online
The circus of life
“Someone once told me that life is made up of stages. The sweetest is love, the most difficult separation, the most painful farewells, the most beautiful reunion”. Louis is a child alone, lives in an orphanage and has no friends. He is teased for his thick glasses and not slender physique, his days seem to never end. The only beautiful moments he has are those he spends at the Marcos circus, where he admires the animals, the shows and Clara, a girl his age who trains the elephants.
In the short period in which the circus is in town, a strong bond is created between the two, a complicity capable of overcoming time, space and difficulties. The circus of life is a romantic graphic novel, sweet and heartbreaking at the same time, which will take the reader on a journey of delicacy and sacrifice, of hope and pain, but certainly of love. The circus of life it is an astonishing story, one that he has collected numerous awards such as: Festival BD d’Amiens, Rencontres du 9e Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Festival BD d’Audincourt and many others.
Circus of Life is available to purchase online
Forever
“But then what is this love that everyone talks about?”. This is the question that fills Viola’s mind, a teenager who dreams of love like all her peers but who still doesn’t know what it means to love and be loved. Because she Viola doesn’t love herself. Her body is not slender and thin like that of her best friend Valeria, she has a few extra pounds and she doesn’t feel feminine at all. She doesn’t like dresses, skirts, but she prefers a pair of slacks and a t-shirt. She is full of insecurities and doubts but at the same time she would like to let go and forget that sense of inadequacy to be different from others.
His world abruptly changes when he meets Ireneo. With him, she Viola discovers that the love it’s not the exclusive feeling they had told her about, but a force capable of freeing you and opening you up to the world, while putting you in touch with the deepest and most authentic part of you. Forever is a delicate and intense teenage love story, a book on the parent-child relationship, on the challenge of pre-established social categories and on the courage to become ourselves. One of the sweetest comics on this list to read absolutely in company on Valentine’s Day because, spoiler, the chances of being moved are high!
Forever is available to purchase online
