Edited by Alexander Finbow, Shea Proulx, Emily Pomeroy and Hartley Rose
Renegade Arts & Entertainment
2025/$29.99/176 PP.
Alberta Comics: Love is a joyful and sometimes heartbreaking anthology of 48 stories—comics and graphic narratives—from emerging and well-known artists around the province. Each piece in this slim volume is between one and five pages long, so readers get only a taste of a story before jumping into the next one. As described in the short introduction, the anthology aims to “Examin[e] ideas of what constitutes true love, reframing everything panel by panel, with no one person claiming a definitive answer.”
Each piece here is an intimate sharing of something the artist loves. Which is not to say this is a saccharine book. Romantic stories abound, such as the playful “Muse,” by Molly Receveur, or Simone Stehouwer’s achingly sweet “Rock,” but many of the comics end with a laugh, like Aaron Navrady’s about crafting a balloon dog from a condom or Eric Dyck accidentally spotting turkey vultures… erm, reuniting. There are also delightfully weird pairings—Bigfoot and an FBI agent, a computer virus and its host, a rat and a living cardboard box, to name a few.
While reading Love I discovered artists I’m now excited about. Take Hollis Parrott, for example, whose “Labour of Love” isn’t drawn but cut from layers of black and white paper. Parrott also incorporates burnt scraps of letters and bits of string that look like they could be lifted off the page. Jarret Hartnell, in “Connection Never Severed,” hand-illustrates every panel in an array of glowing colours, creating a sci-fi world in which a cosmic transformation, personal tragedy and hope for the future unfold. Across the artistic spectrum, Brianna Rose’s digitally rendered comic about asexuality, “Love in spades,” is adorable. Rose cuddles with cats, somersaults across the sun and shouts through a megaphone “I love soooo much!!”
The range of art styles is a boon in this anthology, as it makes it easy to tell where one story ends and the next begins. Only one transition confused me, where I briefly thought an elderly couple had transformed into robots. Likewise, the choice not to sort comics into thematic categories gives each piece maximum impact and prevents similar stories—such as the three or four about pets—from melding together. You never know what you’ll find when you flip the page.
Buried in the middle of the book is the deceptively simple “A Soft Memory,” by Mouse Brown. Brown perfectly captures nostalgia on a single page with captions that read “My first love,/ Although we were never together…/ …thank you for the experience.” At heart, most of the comics here boil down to this. Long lasting or cut short, friends or lovers, in the past or in a far-flung future, everyone is grateful for the love in their life.
Quin Lancaster is a writer in Calgary.
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