Love Fights reminds me of Breakfast After Noon and Slow News Day, and yet it's completely different from those two projects for the most part. Watson has transplanted his gifts for dramatic romance and believable characters into a new genre and setting and the result is a book that has a fun sense of humor and observations about the super-hero genre and celebrity culture married to the best romance story running in comics today. Watson's minimalist style also turns out to be surprisingly suited to the super-hero realm, in no small part thanks to his strong work on the architecture of the surroundings and the dreamlike qualities of some of the story. I had high expectations for Love Fights, and so far it hasn't had any trouble reaching them on a consistent basis.
Though Love Fights is set in a world of super-heroes, Watson keeps his focus clearly on the real. The stories revolve around tabloid journalism, the politics of the comic-book industry and a fledgling romance. What's impressive is that he manages to involve these disparate threads into one story where one thing has effects on the other. Poor Jack has a rough day thanks to all three, as his romance is threatened by his own jealousy and worry, his career is threatened by his partner's chance to move up and then, in a nice little double whammy, he finds the guy at the center of his career at risk thanks to his would-be girlfriend's career. It's a nice bit of intricate plotting, and I'm anxious to see the ramifications of all these stories from a plot point-of-view.
What Watson has always excelled at, though, at least for me, is involving characterization. There's some absolute truth in the way Jack reacts to things in this issue. The conversation between Guthrie and Jack is transparent to the reader, and it's easy to see Guthrie's motives and how he's playing with Jack's head, but it's also easy to buy that Jack wouldn't see it. Jack's self-torture and doubt, indicated as his "choker" tendencies were by super-hero scenes in his imagination, is all too easy to relate to by anyone who has had doubts about their relationships, especially in the early stages when you weren't really sure whether it was a relationship or not.
Along with the relationship developing between Jack and Nora, which seems like the fulcrum on which the series turns, Watson provides several interesting story moments in this issue. The confrontation between Jack, Russ and Sue is as effective a portrayal of the uncomfortable conversations that come up in that sort of situation as I've seen. And though it's not quite as grounded in the real, Nora's calm and sarcastic manner when confronting the Flamer, and his eventual reaction, makes for an interesting story element... to be honest, I'm not sure if he's telling the truth or not, and that's another plot-oriented story point that I'm curious to see resolved.
Andi Watson is a singular talent who doesn't get anywhere near the recognition he deserves, and Love Fights is an example of him working at the top of his game. While this is a romance comic at its heart, its exploration of the celebrity politics of super-heroes should appeal to fans of Powers and Astro City as well.
