Welcome to the latest instalment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers.
This month, I’m going to explore a new graphic novel with an innovative format that uses its speculative lens to look at two characters in a secondary fantasy world who aren’t trying to save the universe or the kingdom – they’re just trying to make their relationship work: Hien Pham’s It Will Be Hard. (This review contains spoilers!)
It Will Be Hard, written and drawn by Hien Pham, coded by Amos Wolfe
Sometimes, like when I take a look at a popular webcomic, or when I reviewed this year’s Hugo nominees for Best Graphic Story, I use a fairly expansive definition of works that “deserve more attention from SF&F readers.” And that’s fine. I mean, it’s my column.
But It Will Be Hard, by writer/artist Hien Pham, fits my self-imposed mandate in a much more clear and unambiguous way. It’s a fantasy graphic novel that I had literally never heard of until a comics publisher I follow retweeted the creator’s offer to provide review copies. But for spotting that tweet and deciding I should follow up, I might never have become aware of this story at all.
And it’s a delight.
Harold and Arthur live in the City of Tripoint, built where three once-hostile but now-peaceful kingdoms meet. They’re a couple, in love, with a relationship that’s not so new that they haven’t recognized some of the challenges and incompatibilities between them – but not so old that they’ve entirely figured out what to do about them.
Their biggest apparent incompatibility, and the one that drives the plot, is their sex drives. Harold’s is high enough that his need for physical love can lead him to make problematic choices, while Arthur is on what we’d call the asexual spectrum. But that’s not the real problem; the real problem is that the solution they’ve worked out – brokered by their friend/boss/mentor Lydia – isn’t working anymore, and they don’t know how to talk about it, much less fix it.
Meanwhile, there’s a major festival coming up, celebrating the peace treaty, and Lydia needs their help to ensure that her tavern does good business and continues to thrive during and after the event.
That’s the plot. There are no quests, no sword-fights, no capital-E Evil to overcome. Just two men who love each other, but aren’t sure if that’s enough, trying to make their relationship work. There’s very little action at all – some dancing, some sex – and the only violence is when one character angrily shrugs another off.
It’s beautiful.
I didn’t realize, until I read this, how much my heart needed a quiet, loving fantasy that uses its secondary world as an opportunity to explore relationships, different ways of loving, and the way partners need to work to make their relationships and different ways of loving function.
Pham describes It Will Be Hard, on his website, as “an erotic interactive comic… focusing on respect, boundaries, and sweet, smutty cuddling.”
And all that is true! Especially the cuddling. There is so much glorious cuddling.
But I’d probably call also call this an inclusive, queer, sex-positive, relationship-driven domestic fantasy, about two men with different needs navigating being one another’s primary partners in a secondary world.
Hien Pham’s art is, frankly, adorable, showcasing a real gift for showcasing expressions and emotion, establishing characters I immediately found myself loving and wanting to hug, as well as believable, relatable human bodies in all their glorious variety.
The rest of the cast of characters is gloriously diverse, with a range of skin tones, ethnicities, body types, ages, and genders.
The depiction of locations and setting is handled a little more lightly – Lydia’s bar, where Harold and Arthur work, is beautifully designed and depicted, but I didn’t quite realize until re-reading that Tripoint is a medieval-equivalent city, rather than a village, but since it’s people and relationships that are at the heart of this story, that’s a minor quibble at worst.
Caveats? I mean, for those who are concerned about such things, there’s discussion of sex, obviously, and a brief interlude of explicit sex, with male nudity – although the creator has even made an abridged version of the book available that omits the explicit section, for those who prefer that.
The graphic novel is designed as a stand-alone program that readers can download in a variety of formats. It runs on your preferred device, but outside of an e-reader (there’s also a PDF version). Depending on how you feel about e-readers, that could be a drawback or a benefit.
The program is billed as being “interactive”, and a “choose-your-own gentle smut adventure”. What that means in practice is that readers can choose to follow either Harold or Arthur’s point of view for key scenes. Readers scroll through not only pages, but each panel, which quickly but unobtrusively fades in with a click of the “next” icon. This is an innovative and imaginative design and use of technology, and it supports the overall theme and the story’s gentle rhythm and tone. It does, though, make for some redundancy for those like me who prefer a linear reading experience.
The graphic novel was created following a successful Kickstarter conducted last year, but for those of us who missed that, both the full and abridged versions can be purchased for download in Windows, Mac, Linux and (non-interactive) PDF formats from the creator’s website.
I don’t think I’ve ever had the opportunity to showcase a graphic novel that was, probably, so truly under the radar of most SF&F readers, and that so truly deserves a wider audience. Please consider supporting Hiem Pham and this wonderful, innovative work; I didn’t know that secondary-world, gently-erotic, inclusive, queer, sex-positive, relationship-driven domestic fantasy was a thing, but it’s terrific, and I want there to be more of it.
NOTE: This review has been edited to fix an incorrect credit; coding of the project was by Amos Wolfe. John Kane, to whom I mistakenly attributed the work, was responsible for the Kickstarter build. My apologies for the error!
Acknowledgements and Disclosures: I would like to acknowledge that Toronto, and the land it now occupies, where I live and work, has been a site of human activity for 15,000 years. This land is the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and Confederacy of the Ojibwe and allied nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. This territory is also covered by the Upper Canada Treaties. Today, the meeting place of Toronto is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. I am grateful to have the opportunity to live and work in the community of Toronto, on this territory.
I have no personal or professional relationships with the creators. Hien Pham provided me with a complimentary electronic copy of the graphic novel for review.
