Andi Watson specialises in low-key character stories, with his distinctively minimal, greytone artwork.  He is therefore the last person in the world that you'd expect to announce an ongoing monthly superhero series, but here's Love Fights #1 regardless - a superhero romance comic.

Some of you might remember Young Heroes In Love (though given the sales figures for that book, I suspect not many of you).  Well, this is nothing like that.  Barring dual identities, this isn't actually a story about superheroes themselves.  Instead, it's a love story about Jack and Nora, two people living in the shadow of the superheroes.

Jack's an artist on a licensed comic about the Flamer, a fire-powered hero with an ill-advised name whose popularity is going through a bit of a dip at the moment.  Nora works at eXpose, a magazine which is very interested in the superheroes, but only if it's juicy.  But despite all this, it's really a story about relationships, which is usually Watson's strength.  Jack is chronically unable to ask girls out, despite his vehement denial.  Andi Watson knows all the buttons to push so that an issue of Jack's intensive dithering resonates rather than just making you wish he'd do something.

You'd think that Watson's art would be a horrible clash of styles with the superheroes.  Of course, the superheroes are kept right to the margins of this story - the battle in this issue takes place almost entirely off camera - so that doesn't really present a problem.  When we do see them, they're often just lines in the sky or vague shapes in the horizon.  They're a presence around the edge of the world, part of the background rather than something that's really knocked the world off course.

It's still a curious mix.  The tension between the superhero genre and Watson's style is part of the fun here, though, and the result isn't really a hybrid so much as an Andi Watson comic with superheroes around the edges.  It works, though.

Rating: A

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