Love Fights #6 confirms a couple of my cherished notions, nurtured and grown from childhood through adulthood. One, super-heroes are noble and good and two, cats are evil. I don't want to get too much into the specifics (and spoilers) of this confirmation, but suffice it to say that Guthrie the talking super-powered cat continues his quest to break up Jack and Nora with distressingly predictable results and the truth about the Flamer's child (or at least part of it) is revealed. It's a nice payoff for a lot of the development in the first arc, but it's also very much the beginning of more rather than the end, and given that Watson usually works in six-issue miniseries, I'm really glad that Love Fights is an ongoing, so I can see where he takes these characters from here.
It's kind of amazing how much story Watson gets into this issue, given that the majority of it takes place in Jack's apartment, and most of it centers around his dates with Nora. However, in addition to some significant turning points in their relationship, this issue also features changes of status quo for Jack's working partners and the Flamer, as well as a definitive answer to whether or not the kid belongs to the Flamer. The hows and whys of the truth are left a mystery for future arcs, but the actual answer is provided here.
There's also a fair amount of humor to be had in this issue. Jack's slow realization about Donnie, and Donnie's low-rent, likeable sleazeball act, provides for some really funny moments, and you can hardly blame Jack for seeing Donnie's misfortune as a boon. Watson's storytelling, using graphics to indicate Jack's thoughts, give us a snapshot of exactly what he's thinking, but the pictorial representation also makes it funnier, and I like how subtle changes of props in Jack's head can show us his thought process so clearly.
However, the real central fulcrum that this issue turns on is the relationship between Jack and Nora. Watson flirts with frustration, here, as the relationship is the subject of a lot of misunderstandings, but he gets a pass from me to some degree because most of those misunderstandings are the result of deliberate meddling. By the end of the issue, anyone who really wants to see Jack and Nora together will want to strangle Guthrie, and that's a pretty good indicator that Watson is wrapping the readers up in this relationship and making them care about it. There are some nice subtleties here, as the couple watches movies and talks about food and generally does the kind of getting to know you stuff that is part of real relationships.
Though I'm a super-hero fan, I'm generally a much bigger fan of Watson's slice-of-life stuff than the super-hero type work he's done for Marvel. However, while Love Fights does have super-heroic elements to it, it's more true to Watson's writing and art strengths, and it's absolutely as strong as Breakfast After Noon and Slow News Day. In fact, given that it's an ongoing, and thus he has more room to really develop the characters and plots, it might be his strongest work yet.
