By Kim W. Andersson with Sara B. Elfgren & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-859-8 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-63008-152-2
Internationally acclaimed and award-winning, Kim W. Andersson began his comics career in fanzines, and after studying at the Serieskolan School of Art in Malmö began his professional life with contributions to Sweden’s broad and varied comics industry. His first hit series was Love Hurts which began in 2009.
Wry, creepy, mordant and ironically funny, the series appeared in numerous venues before serialisation in anthology series Dark Horse Presents, for us English speakers. In 2015 Dark Horse Books re-presented the entire shebang in one titanic, trenchant tome…
Collecting Love Hurts #1-22, Love Hurts: Anastasia from Nemi, and #23-32 as seen in Utopi Magasin, also included here is one-shot Love Hurts: Dead End courtesy of Johnossi Comics – which you would already know if you read more stuff published in Scandinavia…
Since then, Andersson has returned to school thematically in chiller Alena (made into a movie) and Astrid: Cult of the Volcanic Moon. When not lecturing, creating gallery shows or making comics, the auteur works as an illustrator of book, magazines and for TV.
Following Peter Snejbjerg’s barbed Introduction ‘It was a Dark and Stormy Night’, what follows is a rapid-fire, smartly sarcastic and cunningly pilfered and plundered tribute to all aspects of mass entertainment and popular fiction from EC Comics to slasher movies, manipulating relationships as a trigger for jabs, pokes and broadsides at how and why people (and related beings) want, need and use other people…
The result is a nonstop procession of gags and incidents starring serial killers, domestic abusers, needy girlfriends, procurers, and wayward teens all encountering endings they might not deserve but certainly should have been expecting…
Sexy, gory yet remarkably not salacious, pastiches of screen shockers are supplemented by surreal and metaphysical moments, historical fantasies, ghostly encounters or sci fi and monster moments: all leavened by a darkly childish sense of the absurd and all illustrated with fetching style…
From spoofs starring 50-foot girlfriends to perplexing prom night pranks; from western showdowns and manga cautionary tales to lovingly irreverent myths mauled and manipulated, the marriage of amour and peril is dissected, with demons, devils, doctors, dweebs and dolly-birds re-examined via a puckish contemporary lens. There’s even a murky nod to superheroes and – just when you’re off guard – genuine tragedy amidst the crimson-spattered comedy…
Here love comes in all sizes, shapes and kinds with nothing barred or forbidden but with precious little in the way of happy endings…
The short punchy vignettes are bolstered by two longer tales: frenzied fairy tale Love Hurts: Anastasia darkly riffs on the tale of Bluebeard and 1001 Arabian Nights by way of Puss in Boots and Night of the Living Dead whilst Love Hurts: Dead End depicts a deadly pan-dimensional trip to the bad places and a celebrity La-la-land after one poor guy “wins” ‘The Lottery’…
Scary, hilarious, mordant, and in wickedly Bad Taste, these tales for culturally savvy appetites are augmented by a bonus section of Sketches and Extras offering ‘Happy Valentine’s Day!’ cards; working sketches of the models used to create the strips; cover designs; previous collection covers; layouts; original pages in various stages of completion, tattoo art and a biography.
Dark, doom-swept, daft, deranged and delightful, this may be the most appropriate appreciation of the annual emotional event yet conceived…
Love Hurts™ © 2015 Kim W. Andersson. All rights reserved.