At NYCC, Nick Pitarra and Joe Eisma held a contest in which the first person to find Kevin Mellon and give him a big hug wins a bunch of stuff (seriously). Me, being the fan of hugs that I am (or whatever), took them up on this challenge, found Kevin Mellon, and gave him a big hug and a kiss on the cheek (no, seriously). Of course, I wouldn’t just embarass the crap out of him and not reward his efforts for being a total champ, so I bought Lovestruck from him and ran off giggling.
Ok, fine — I was going to buy Lovestruck anyway. It’s just funnier to tell the story of how I got it at NYCC if I start it like I did, because now I get to make jokes about how I’m “lovestruck” for Kevin Mellon (or whatever is most appropriate/least creepy).
ALL OF THAT ASIDE, hop after the cut for some thoughts on Dennis Hopeless and Kevin Mellon’s Lovestruck.
Lovestruck the graphic novel is essentially what I assume would’ve been Lovestruck the six-issue mini-series. Part cynical assault on the nature of relationships and part endearing love letter to music of a bygone era and the romantic ideals that went along with it, Lovestruck is definitely a fun new spin on an old tale, and it is a great show of force from Hopeless and Mellon, two creators who I can only assume you’ll be hearing quite a bit about soon.
In Lovestruck, love is an enterprise. Cupid, that fat god bastard, sits in his mighty chair atop his skyscraper and takes care of love for us, zapping us with energy instead of arrows. As we enter the world of Lovestruck, we’re introduced to Kalli, our heroine and newest recruit of Cupid’s lovely enterprise (pun intended). Of course, as we soon learn, there is more to love than just being struck by magic and falling in love with the first person in sight. Instead it’s a dangerous game of chess, as Kalli is assimilated into her role and quickly discovers that she has more power and a greater destiny than she even realizes. Throw in a steady love of punk and the dying/reborn hipster scene, and you’ve got Lovestruck in a nutshell.
Putting out Lovestruck as a collected graphic novel is essentially a stroke of genius on Hopeless and Mellon’s part, as it allows the story to be much more quickly and richly assimilated. The easy access to all parts of the tale definitely enhances the reading of it, and it allows more room for quick analysis. Not to bad mouth the production of a mini-series or anything like that, but part of the reason I enjoyed Lovestruck half as much as I did was because of the lack of wait time. It’s essentially a plus to the “wait for trade” column of comic reading, because while this certainly would’ve made a grand mini-series that would’ve hopefully created strong word of mouth for the eventual trade release, now Lovestruck can reach a different audience that may not have visited a comic store monthly. We’re given the book instead of the individual parts of a whole, and Lovestruck – despite ostensibly reading as a collected mini – captures our imagination and attention.
The reason a book like Lovestruck can easily stand out amongst the waves and waves of new books and new creators trying to charm you is simply because it is so affable. It’s an entirely relatable story of growing up and being assimilated into a corporate structure while still trying to retain the things that defined your youth. Sure, there are battles, mini-adventures, fashion, sex and punk rock, but these are like decorations on the tree that is Lovestruck’s central pillar of growth into adulthood. In its own way, it’s a coming of age story in the fashion of the grandest of coming of age stories, and instead of featuring some lonely kid in a high school looking for love in all the wrong places, we’ve got a story that uses love as a tool, as a device for something beyond central definition for a hero or heroine. Kalli’s journey is one that can be recognized as a sort of “second coming” of age, ignoring the teen mentality of “I understand everything but I’m going to grow” and instead reflecting on the more difficult to capture twenty-something mentality of “Wait, how did I get here? This isn’t what those movies promised me!” Kalli gets, Hopeless and Mellon get it, and even if you think the Ramones suck, you’ll get it too.
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Obviously the different elements of Lovestruck and its more obvious battle against love are also important to the story. Hopeless and Mellon are seemingly crafting a letter to all the failed relationships they may have ever had, while simultaneously crafting a poem to the ones that work. The human animal (so to say, in a completely non-skeptical fashion) is one that has grown to define love and relationships as a central part of being human and being alive. Many people are uncomfortable with the prospect of being on their own without anyone in their life, and Hopeless/Mellon essentially distributes the various popular mentalities on sex and love throughout the books various characters and lets them run wild. You’ve got the man who forgoes love in favor of sex, the cynical gold digger who defines relationships by the benefits, the young kid too underdeveloped to process relationship potential, the old soul scorned and burned and regretful of past mistakes — and then you have Kalli, the glue that holds these damaged characters together, the one who helps guide the book through its various commentary on the state of relationships in 2011. Kalli, who begins the book a love hater and a heart breaker, and finishes the book in a completely different mindset, solidifying that aspect of growing up and getting over yourself and preconceived fairy tale notions of how things need to be, how people need to act, and how love needs to be defined.
I hate to call myself a cynical person on relationships given that I’ve been in one for almost three years now (which is officially the longest relationship I’ve ever been in), but if I could hand Lovestruck to certain writers and fictional characters in relationships that purport ideals and foolish overdramatic sensibilities and say, “No, look, see? This is it!”, I would, a million times over I would. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’d make a great Valentine’s Day gift, at the very least I would love to smack Bella and Edward over the head with it, and anyone who defines relationships by their story as well.
