This is Universal Love, a month-long spotlight on LGBTQ comic book stories that I have enjoyed over the years. This isn't meant as a "Best Of" list, since there are so many great works out there and so I'll spread the love around a bit, as it were.

Today, we look at the first major comic book series by the great Colleen Coover, the current Eisner-Award-winning creator of Bandette with Paul Tobin.

The concept of the book is that Annie is a young woman who masturbates too much. So Nibbil is sent to Annie to be sort of her Jiminy Cricket - a small conscience to keep her from masturbating so much. The only trouble is, Nibbil is hornier than Annie, so she spends most of her time having sex with Annie, and getting Annie involved in various escapades that involve lesbian sex.

Done by a worse writer, this could be the premise of a horrible book, but Coover's infectiously delightful and cute storytelling makes for a fun comic book that just happens to involve a lot of sex.

Coover's art style certainly helps matters - she never skimps on the eroticism of the sex, but it is just so darn POSITIVE. Pornography, as a genre, tends to be fairly angry - but not so with Small Favors - this is all about joy.

Don't get me wrong, though, this is still a piece of erotica, so I really can't show you much of the interior pages as they're all about the two characters (and other women) having sex. A clever bit that Coover does in the comic is that there are only ever women shown in the comic. It's basically a sort of lesbian fantasy world.

Along the way, the girls meet Sage, a young woman who seemingly doesn't have a "conscience" like Nibbil.

Obviously, the girls both have sex with Sage, but then, in the final issue of the series, they find a girlfriend for Sage. Here's one of the few sequences that I can actually show you, where the girls show up at a garage sale and discover a woman that they had flirted with in a previous issue but the woman backed out of actually having sex with them. Now that they're at her home, though, she has another chance to re-think things...

After eight issues, Coover figured that she essentially achieved her goal. She had created a positive, adorable piece of erotica, all of her characters were now in mature relationships and, amusingly, she had though of pretty much every sex position that she could think of, so Coover moved on to other works (she did the all-ages Banana Sunday after this).

Boy, Coover is such a great talent.

If you have a suggestion for an LGBTQ work that you'd like to see me spotlight, feel free to drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com.