It’s the first Rec League request of the new year and we have a fun combination of elements: historical romance and graphic novels. Big thanks to Kate for sending in this request:
I was wondering if there were any historical romance graphic novels. I found a piece of one called “Ruined” in a collection of romance comics on Kindle, but apparently the press went under and it was never finished. Has anyone come across something similar? I would love to mix my love of historical romance with my love of graphic fiction!
Carrie: Sleepless by Sarah Vaughn ( A | BN ), is fantasy but with a strong historical feel.
Amanda: There’s an Emma graphic novel! We had a guest review of the anime adaption several years ago.
Sarah and I were also discussing manga. A lot of Harlequin category romances have been made into manga.
Sarah: For graphic novels, I am amid some of the biggest bookstores I have seen, and there is so much manga, some of it historical and looks like romance, but alas I don’t know how to read Japanese.
These are Japanese Harlequins, which does no one any good but the covers are fun.
There’s also this list that might help.
Amanda: One historical romance with mythology I loved is the Korean manhwa, Bride of the Water God ( A | BN ). It’s absolutely beautiful, but an incredibly slow burn.
Do you know of any historical romance graphic novels?
I got The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel in hardcover when it came out years ago, and loved how close to my imaginings the characters looked. Bonus – it’s based on the original book, but from Jamie’s point of view!
The Dreamer is a free webcomic about a teenager time-traveling to the New York campaign of the American Revolution and falls in love (is in love, it’s a bit complicated) with a soldier. Tons of historical cameos, including ones people now all know thanks to Hamilton. Unfortunately it hasn’t updated in a couple years, but there’s still a good deal of content and the art gets progressively more stunning. Also YMMV on the romantic lead, I honestly can’t stand him and vastly prefer the girl’s romantic interest in the present day, but it’s still a lot of fun.
Not only historical, but also fantasy are the three Soulless mangas by REN and written by Gail Carriger. Beautiful work!
While not fully historical ( there are some heavy fantasy elements, including the setting) YONA of the DAWN , it is heavily based on Korean history and Yona, the lead is a fantastic heroine. Bonus points the main love interest is sweet and super hot.
Nancy Butler has done several Jane Austen adaptations which I liked a lot. A lovely series is the “Color of Earth” trilogy by Dong Hwa Kim about a girl growing up in 19th century Korea. Her romantic HEA is just one of the strands in the story–you also hear about her widowed mother’s romantic partner and other aspects of growing up. I was really excited about “Ruined” which was a Regency romance in the Fresh Romance anthology, but they never got to finish publishing it.
Yes, I also really liked The Dreamer! I wish she would keep going.
The author of Emma has an ongoing series called A Bride’s Storey. It’s set in in Central Asia during the 19thc. and the illustrations are gorgeous. It tells the stories of new brides, or young women looking to be brides in various cultures across the region. It is very charming.
The Prince and the Dressmaker – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34506912-the-prince-and-the-dressmaker?from_search=true
It’s thin on romance, more fantasy-history than history, but so delightful you won’t care. At your library, it will probably be shelved in YA.
For those wondering about The Dreamer, Lora Innes got tapped to do the comic adaptations of the Wynnona Earp series, so The Dreamer is on hiatus during that run. However, The Dreamer itself got picked up as a comic title also; I have seen it in comic stores but do not know if new issues are being produced in that format.
@Trish, I also recommend The Prince and The Dressmaker by Jen Wang, but it’s not really a romance at all imo. It’s very good though and it is a fairy tale. Beautifully drawn, with great clothes!
Oh gosh! Emma is one of my favorites. I discovered Kaoru Mori through Emma and she quickly became one of my favorite comic creators! Bride’s Story is also so well crafted and amazing. Some of my other recommendations are Red River by Chie Shinohara and Kaze Hikaru by Taeko Watanabe. Red River is a pretty classic time slip romance and Kaze Hikaru features a cross-dressing heroine.
I’m also a graphic novel creator myself! My partner and I are working on a historical paranormal LGBT+ romance webcomic called Novae. http://www.novaecomic.com/
We love listening to the podcast while we work and needless to say, we’re excited to see this blog post 😀
Thank you for all the wonderful content!
I also very much enjoyed the Soulless graphic novel adaptations. They probably fit more into the Historical/Supernatural category, taking place in an alternate version of Victorian London. I’ve heard them described as Buffy meets Jane Austen, which I think fits about right.
There’s a graphic novel about the author Colette (released at the same time as the movie, but not a direct tie-in) called “The Provocative Colette,” by Annie Goetzinger. I haven’t read it, but I believe it’s a general overview of her life, with a 3/5 rating on Goodreads.
Yukarism maybe? (Edo era Yoshiwara setting.)
I think the historical part was more mystery than romance, but probably it still fits because there was a couple in love in both their past and present incarnations. Strictly speaking that’s probably timeslip romance rather than plain historical, but. If in doubt, spoil the ending.
There was also some interesting play on gender roles because gender was not constant across incarnations.
There’s a whole line called Manga Classics, published by Udon Entertainment, where works by various authors are adapted into manga. I’ve only read Pride and Prejudice, but they definitely parted from Austen in many ways in it.
Defines more as adventure than romance, as the characters are underage, but probably “Basil and Victoria”, the comic book series on street kids in Victorian London that was adapted into a cartoon as “Orson and Olivia”.
(French Wikipedia warns that the comic is harder-edged than the kids’ TV series, so I guess the comic would be about YA-ish?)
There are a couple of other romance manga set in early twentieth century Japan. In Rinko Ueda’s seven-volume series “Stepping on Roses,” teenage Sumi is a poor but indomitable girl who lives in a shack in the slums with her goodhearted but shady brother, who keeps bringing home orphaned babies and toddlers who have nowhere else to go. (Apparently none of them are his illegitimate offspring, even though the brother is basically kind of a gigolo.) With five or six little kids to take care of on virtually no income, Sumi is so desperate to find some way to pay for medicine for the ailing youngest child that she agrees to marry a passing rich guy whose grandfather won’t make him his official heir unless he produces a suitable wife. (A “My Fair Lady”-style training period in upper class manners follows, complete with coaching by the hot young butler about Western-style clothes and table manners, which were apparently quite the fad in certain quarters of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Japanese high society.) Sumi’s husband is kind of a jerk for much of the manga (his tragic backstory explains why pretty plausibly, and he eventually snaps out of it), but Sumi’s common sense and unexpected ability to win over bigshot customers of her husband’s business by playing high-level games of shogi (a chess-like board game) with them make her more of an asset to his efforts to take over his grandfather’s commercial empire than he expected. There are also a lot of interesting subplots with good supporting characters, including one involving the husband’s much nicer-seeming friend who falls madly in love with Sumi, with near-tragic results.
Keiko Ishihara’s “The Heiress and the Chauffeur” is a two-volume series about a rich young lady from a more traditionally Japanese upper class milieu who falls in love with her good-looking young chauffeur/bodyguard. Their chaste romance seems doomed, especially after the perpetually-absent dad whom the heroine is desperate to please starts pushing her to agree to an arranged marriage with someone who’s much more suitable in terms of money and status. It all works out rather ingeniously in the end, although I’m not sure if the outcome is entirely historically plausible.