All this month I'll be reviewing different comic books by female creators, based on submissions from the actual creators of the comic books themselves. Here's a list of all the books featured so far this month.

We continue with Love Me Nice by Amanda Lafrenais...

Love Me Nice has one of the most inventive set-ups for what is basically a relationship series that you'll ever hear. The concept of the series is that we now live in a world where cartoons and humans co-exist. Cartoons (or simply "Toons") are flesh and blood and just live their lives like anyone else, except, of course, the fact that they are toons. So anthropomorphic dogs and cats interact with humans. The star of the comic is Mac T. Monkey Jr., who has taken over the children's cartoon show that made his father the most famous toon in the world. He lives with his girlfriend/manager, Claire, also a toon (albeit a half-human one) who is the grand-daughter of a Betty Coop stand-in. Since she is stuck with curvaceous Betty Boop-esque body of her grandmother, Claire finds it difficult to be taken seriously as an intelligent woman, so she was "stuck" taking care of the spoiled Mac as an intern. They eventually fell in love and she became his manager. Mac's co-star is a young naive toon named Carolina who is love-struck by Mac. The main conflict of the comic is the relationship between Claire and Mac, who has that annoying mixture of being spoiled like crazy but also hating the fact that he was born into entertainment royalty. Underneath it all, though, he's definitely a nice guy - just not particularly thoughtful.

Here are some early interactions between the trio...

And the result of Mac's thoughtlessness mixed with Carolina's earnest naivete...

Lafrenais is an excellent storyteller and her pages flow really well (her main strength, though, as you can see, is character design - she really knows how to construct interesting looks for her various characters). She has created a fascinating world and interesting lead characters, so she seems like she'll have enough material here to do this strip for years, which is good news, as the strip is a blast!

Check out Love Me Nice (the title is a reference to a line from the song "Witch Doctor") here (the first couple of pages are in color for whatever reason but then it goes to black and white and stays that way.