Loverboys Review: Soulless

Romance stories may be sappy and pornography for women, but there are times when they can be well done and worth looking at. The “PEN Center USA” Graphic Literature Award winning graphic novel “Loverboys” by Gilbert Hernandez is not one of them. In fact, it will make you question the award it received.

The plot is a bunch of small plots strewn together. There’s Daniela making friends with Mrs. Paz after she was caught cheating on her test, Daniela and her friends plotting to blow up the town using dynamite and a plot about the “little people” living in the town. The plot that gets the most focus is Mrs. Paz and Rocky getting into a relationship.
That’s where the story struggles. It jumps from one plot to another without any segue. These plots also feel very mundane and not at all interesting. If anything, the comic reads like a poor attempt at a sitcom only without the humor.

There are ways to make mundane events interesting. Look at “Seinfeld” or ‘Azumanga Daioh.” Both are about everyday events, but both manage to make them entertaining and add in a few dozen laughs. Here it’s just so everyday and devoid of any character that the reader is finding any reason to be invested.

This mundane attitude seeps through into the characters. What are supposed to be these quirky characters come off more like average people you’d see on the street. They’re just there.

Not to mention the plots are resolved in rushed and uninteresting ways. In fact, they don’t even feel like resolutions but beginnings of resolutions.

While the story is mundane, the art is just god awful. The characters look like rough sketches and someone forgot to complete them. Not to mention the facial expressions are just scary and inhuman. The first time you see them you’ll get a shock. Also, there’s one big inconsistency with Mrs. Paz. When we see her with normal clothes she has the same proportions as the other characters. When she’s dressed in revealing clothing or naked she has these cartoonishly-gigantic breasts. In fact, one of the most obvious instances is when she and Daniela are at the beach. She is wearing a jacket that makes her look flat chested, but she takes it off and her breasts just pop out. This may have been done for aesthetic reasons, but it’s very distracting.

“Loverboys” is a soulless, boring comic with some of the worst art in the comic business today. This is one love story that’s best left with your ex who dumped you out of the blue.