Posted in: Comics, Preview, Speculator Corner | Tagged: Comics, our love is real
Speculator Watch: Our Love Is Real by Sam Humphries and Steven Sanders
Yesterday, Bleeding Cool told you about Our Love Is Real, a 300 copy limited edition comic book published today, from Fraggle Rock's Sam Humphries and X-Men's Steve Sanders.
It's about a Judge Dredd who fucks dogs.
It feels in many ways like early Transmetropolitan, a younger Warren Ellis married with the outrageous instincts of Garth Ennis on Preacher, all covered by a Frank Quitely-style approach to artwork.
When I first approached this book I was expecting some kind of conservative satire that equated gay love and marriage to legal bestiality, attacking the former by portraying the latter in similar terms. This is not that book.
It is a social satire, as all the best science fiction is. We are shown a sex obsessed society, where procreation isn't a factor, but fetishim has divided sexual tastes to such a degree that it leads to violence. Zoophiles, vegesexuals, crystal fuckers. And Jok, a bigoted fascist policeman with his own prejudices and hypocricies, and willing to reflect them in the faces he puts his boot into.
But for all that, it's also a love story, about the moment that Jok looks outside his sexual boundaries, and the consequences of those actions, of those thoughts, in this one shot sci-fi short story with a twist ending – that yet bgs for an ongoing series. And it is also obsessed with ultra violence, itself almost a sexual release, and a perfect opportunity for such an individual to find some release by kicking some heads in.
It's funny, it's poignant, it's clever, it's intriguing, and it's sex'n'violence taken to logical and illogical conclusions, in a world shown with all its strange quirks portrayed as just part of the scenery, in some cases quite literally. It's a really fun comic book that could get quite a following.
But like I said, they're only printing three hundred copies. So with this kind of attention, it suddenly becomes something else.
After Bleeding Cool ran the piece, Newsarama, Comic Book Resources and Comics Alliance also ran articles. I understand that at the shops we listed yesterday, phones had been ringing off the hook and retailers have been desperately trying to order new copies.
Now, you can always buy a copy on comiXology. But if you want one in print, well, either grab a limited number of mail order copies, sweet talk one of the listed retailers, or be prepared to spend some serious coin. If you want your new Mouse Guard original #1, well it could be right here.