Faith Erin Hicks’s new graphic novel, Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy, puts a sweet spin on a classic story. Aloof hockey jock Alix is tired of being bullied by her team captain, Lindsay, who verbally abuses her, and their coach, who lets the abuse fly. After Alix punches Lindsay for a particularly egregious string of insults, she’s frightened by her own anger and wants to learn how to let things roll off her back. She reaches out to popular, calm, collected theater kid Ezra, who endures homophobic bullying from Lindsay’s boyfriend on a daily basis.
As Alix and Ezra get to know each other, they form a close friendship and then develop romantic feelings, which Alix beats herself up about because she believes Ezra is gay. When he tells her he’s bisexual, she’s relieved, then nervous again: Would he ever even like her that way? They come from very different worlds, but that might be the recipe for the perfect romance.
For Hicks, creating Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy, her first-ever solo romance story, was especially vulnerable: “I’ve really enjoyed telling stories with strong friendships, and that has been a really big part of my work for the past decade-plus. Occasionally there’ll be elements of romance sprinkled throughout the stories I’ve told, but I’ve never done a romance before,” she tells The Mary Sue. “Of course, I’ve collaborated with writers like Rainbow Rowell on Pumpkinheads, which has an element of romance, but that wasn’t my story. That was her story.”
Hicks, who identifies as bisexual, says her intent with Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy wasn’t to necessarily “reverse gender roles,” but to write “characters that spoke to me and characters I thought would be just really interesting to bring together and see where their stories went.” However, it’s rare to see an openly bisexual teenage boy in fiction, and Ezra’s story makes this queer romance comic stand out because of that.
“I just loved the idea of a teen who was happily queer, but then at this point in his life, is not particularly interested in labels. This is maybe a little too personal, but I did grow up in a home where it was not acceptable or safe to be queer. And I do want to say that my family has really changed over the years and has really grown so much more accepting and has done the work, and I really appreciate and love that about them,” Hicks says. “But when I was a teen in the nineties, it was a very different time and it was not safe and not acceptable to be openly queer. I loved the idea of writing a teen character who was openly queer and happy and accepted and loved for who he was, for his queerness. He was very close to my heart.”
Overall, Hicks says creating and publishing her first solo romance title has been very vulnerable. She shared an exclusive comic strip with The Mary Sue, seen below, about the process, including her childhood feelings about romance and how they changed as she became an adult.
“For a very long time, I was actually not interested in romance as a reader. I feel like if you’re into a certain genre, whether or not you’re super into that genre depends on how you feel about the tropes,” Hicks explains. “I love science fiction tropes. Give me an android who wants to love, and I’m just like, yes, I’m there. I love that stuff. It’s so interesting to me. But some of the romance tropes I found very off-putting, and I feel like that has really changed in the romance genre.
“I feel like at least the romance that I had access to growing up, it was very heteronormative. The women in particular were expected to fill a certain role, and if that’s your jam, that’s fine. But it wasn’t my jam. Then I started reading Alexis Hall, a queer writer from the UK—love his stuff—and was just blown away by how engaging it was. The characters felt so alive and so wonderful. So that was really new and really exciting to me, and I was like, ‘Oh, romance can be this.’ It doesn’t have to be the romance that I was exposed to growing up, which felt much more restrictive.”
In addition to reading Hall’s work, Hicks says she also became enamored with BioWare’s Dragon Age video game series during the pandemic, which further inspired her to want to write romance herself.
“I got completely obsessed with it, played all three of the games multiple times, did the romances multiple times. I drew fan comics, and it was just—I don’t want to say it was the first time I was super into romance. It is not,” Hicks says. “I’ve had various encounters, but it was the first time where I’d just been obsessed specifically with romance plots. I was like, ‘I want to do something like this.’ My book is not fantasy, but [Dragon Age] showed what you can do with romance. Like, holy shit, this is amazing.”
“It’s been such a good experience being able to understand romance better and understand it as a genre and suddenly to get why people like it so much because it is a really, really popular genre,” she continues. “I allowed my own perceptions of the genre to color my opinion of it and I didn’t seek it out for the longest time because I was like, ‘Oh, romance is this.’ And then I actually started reading more broadly and it was like, ‘Oh, there are these wonderful queer authors and I don’t necessarily have to go directly to the heteronormative section.'”
During the course of writing and illustrating Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy, Hicks says she learned that romance can truly take on whatever shape she wants to form it into, which she says “felt very freeing.” Until now, her career has been primarily focused on writing stories about friendship and platonic intimacy, which are still important to her. This time around, she wanted to go a step further and develop a relationship that eventually turns toward romance.
While Hicks says she doesn’t claim the book is “groundbreaking,” she hopes it shows her readers that romance can take any shape and that it doesn’t have to fall into any particular tropes or trappings. She also wants to tell readers that they don’t have to ascribe to labels.
“Also, if your teammates are jerks, or if you’re in a situation where you’re not being treated well, then it’s okay to leave. It’s okay to find a way out,” Hicks adds. “I was really responsible when I was a teen, and if I was in a bad situation, I would just try and do my best to make the situation good, to the detriment of my own emotional health. I think it’s really important that if you’re struggling and you’re in a situation that is hurting you, it’s okay to leave. It’s okay to remove yourself from that situation.”
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy is available everywhere books are sold.
(featured image: First Second)
