Grand slam romance

Just as their title suggests, Hicks and Oosterhous have hit a home run with their debut graphic novel. Mickey Monsoon is just getting used to being the best semiprofessional minor league softball pitcher in town--that is, until Astra Maxima, magical softball player and Mickey's former, maybe-more-than best friend, comes crashing back into their life. Mickey is hell-bent on stopping Astra from seducing everyone in the minor league and ruining the Belle City Broads' chance to win this year's tournament. What will it take to beat a bewitching, bat-wielding babe at her own game? And what is Mickey willing to lose along the way? Hicks and Oosterhous take the magic girl genre and spin it on its head: imagine A League of Their Own as a Sailor Moon manga but make it more hot pink and fluster-inducing. Queer love radiates throughout this hilarious, colorful, and fiery graphic novel, and Oosterhous renders sexual tension and softball action with equally deft linework. This series opener is sure to leave readers swooning and eager for volume 2.

Married creators Hicks and Oosterhous pitch a playful chronicle of the romances and rivalries of a queer softball league. The star is Mickey Monsoon, nonbinary heartthrob and ace pitcher for the Belle City Broads. The Broads are all set to win the year's tournament with their five-time MVP on the mound, but Mickey is thrown a curveball when their crush Astra Maxima, a licentious catcher with magical powers, joins the competition. Astra's prowess as a player, both on the field and in the bedroom, proves hard to beat; off their game, Mickey resigns, until a secret squad is formed with the sole purpose of stopping Astra. Captaining that team is Wolfgang, a six-foot-plus German butch who dated Astra when the two of them were students at the same Swiss softball academy and is bent on her own lovelorn revenge. Oosterhous's exuberant, confectionary artwork plays well off Hicks's rakish script, with the duo changing it up between the madcap puerility of sports manga and unadulterated prurience of an Apatow romp to sometimes rousing--if occasionally cornball--effect. Fans of A League of Their Own should slide head-first into this series. (May)