Lovestruck September

This September, Image Comics will bring readers a love story like no other. Former collaborators on the Gearhead series, writer Dennis Hopeless (HACK/SLASH TRAILERS 2) and artist Kevin Mellon (THIS IS A SOUVENIR: THE SONGS OF SPEARMINT AND SHIRLEY LEE, COMIC BOOK TATTOO, S.H.I.E.L.D.) are now set to debut LOVESTRUCK, an original graphic novel about the manipulations of a greedy modern Cupid who has made love his business.

"Love is such a powerful part of our lives and yet for so many people it’s just an impossibility,” said Hopeless. "We all have those friends who are talented and charming and great in every other way but just can’t make relationships work. They’re always in their own way. Lovestruck is about what happens when these hopelessly loveless folks are given all the powers of Cupid. But how can you control love when you don’t believe in it?"

“Dennis first came to me with the idea as a follow up to Gearhead and we batted it around for a while,” added Mellon. “It was like a light kind of shone on me and it became something I not only wanted to do, but had to do. One of the many joys about working with Dennis is that everything we come up with together, I pretty much HAVE to do. Come hell or high water.”

Along with strikingly beautiful cover art by Erik Jones, Mellon’s clean, detailed line work illustrates the modern setting of Hopeless' unconventional love story perfectly. In LOVESTRUCK, Kali Monroe gets paid to break hearts. When love is a billion-dollar industry and the closest thing to cupid is a megalomaniacal CEO, what’s a girl to do?

However, Hopeless and Mellon's version of Cupid, as Caleb Goellner of ComicsAlliance put it, "...is far from a cherub... and bears more of a resemblance to the theoretical lovechild of Marvel's Wilson Fisk and Akira's Tetsuo than a happy, naked, angel baby dude you'd want shooting infatuation arrows your way."

LOVESTRUCK OGN, a 192-page black and white original graphic novel for $16.99, will be available at a comic store near you on September 7th, 2011.

© C Harris Lynn, 2011