Heartstopper

"Let’s jump to the present. Heartstopper is an ongoing, bestselling graphic novel series and is extremely popular. If you walk into Barnes and Noble, they will practically hit you in the head with it immediately. You might know it because it is a massive Netflix hit . The reasons I wanted to talk about Heartstopper are some of its content, as well as what it means for our current era. You came to me asking about graphic novels, and this is a very strange term that, at some point, meant a very specific novel designed to reach a very specific audience and write one single, defined story. Over time, it came to mean the collected editions of a larger comic book, whether or not they were conceived of as a novel in and of themselves. Heartstopper started out as a webcomic. It was part of a new wave of comics— the vertical-scrolling comic that was innovated in South Korea and spread to the United States, specifically through platforms like Webtoon and Tapas (formerly known as Tapastic, originally as Comic Panda). It is the most successful of its generation at this point, I would argue. There are a number of other comics that are extremely good and competitive, and some of them are in various different states of adaptation; but, as we speak in 2023, it is undeniable that Alex Oseman’s Heartstopper has been one of the most commercially and critically successful comics of this entire decade. Heartstopper takes place in England at a public school (UK equivalent of prep school). It’s a gay romantic story between a somewhat geekier kid and a guy on the rugby team. It shows how the two protagonists, Nick and Charlie, confront the world around them, and the latent homophobia around them, but it’s a very pleasant read. ‘Cozy’ is a word that many would use to describe it. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . While its plot—and this is not intended to diminish it—is not necessarily breaking any new ground; the manner in which it’s told is extremely compelling. Oseman’s art style has a reality to it that people really gravitate towards. The series has been ongoing for a number of years now. It started in 2016. The understanding is that it’s in its final act now. The comics that are going to be coming out on the internet, and then published and aggregated, are winding towards their conclusion. It is impossible to think of a webcomic that has been more explosively successful as an adaptation than Heartstopper has been. It is a sign of the times that even as we have countless superhero movies and dramas, and superheroes are becoming the definitive genre of our time, the comic that is arguably the most successful right now is Heartstopper . It is doing bananas numbers on Netflix. It was in the top 10 English language titles almost immediately. Based on Netflix’s methodology, within the first week, it got 24 million hours viewed. It is a juggernaut, in a way that is fundamentally difficult to comprehend. One of the things that I enjoy about this in particular is that I have a very special place in my heart for LGBTQIA+ comics. There’s been a renaissance on the Web when it comes to the ability to tell stories about gay and lesbian and trans people, in a way that has never been offered through mainstream channels. Some of the most vibrant and exciting communities and conversations online around comics take place inside these communities. This is, bar none, the most successful comic, but also the most successful of that world. It is a mainstream moment for a subculture that I have long been very fond of. That there’s an incredible amount of good work going on is very cool to see."