Soft is a handcrafted romance of ache, secrets, and death

Jane Mai's lesbian vampire love story is flush with tenderness.

Required Reading is DoomRocket’s love chest, opened once a month to champion a book that we adore and you should read. The latest: Soft by Jane Mai, published by Peow2.

The summer Laura fell in love for the first time. A girl drifts into her quiet, aimlessly wandering life that makes her feel things so raw and strong that she wants to keep them secret. Keep her old life and new love separate, afraid of waking up from the dream that was being with Carmilla. Soft is a romance, a vampire story, a love with two sides. Carmilla is polar opposites, roses and ice. Laura is both sides collapsing, her complicated feelings about herself inseparable from her codependent relationship with a supernatural killer. But when Carmilla's around, Laura forgets everything else.

Jane Mai's Soft is just that. Tender. Able to find a low burning warm fuzz inside a sad wreck of a romance. Delicate despite how everywhere there's death. Soft things ache, a sweet feeling that hurts. Mai's melancholy love story is the kind where the blood that pushes up to the skin to blush (or bruise) will inevitably spill. It portrays how love can consume a life, which one doesn't have to date a vampire to experience.

It bears the marks of being handcrafted. Soft has the look of a book that wishes to be read, opulence that desires to be invited in. But Mai's approach is gentle, soft art to match the title. A very simple style, with a lot of work put into the drawing. The minimal lines are an illusion of simplicity; proportion is key to cuteness, and Mai puts in the work to get the look perfect. Think Yoshitomo Nara out of a vintage storybook. (Soft's publisher, Peow2, knows how to wield the power of delicate purple ink on a pulpy page.)

The presence of melancholy might seem like the early, roughneck years of Charlie Brown, but I think Mai's style comes closer to Harvey Comics, the golden age kids' stuff from artists who worked on cartoons and advertising mascots. Vintage, like the dawn of pop culture, by way of sunshine noir like Cosmic Debris' Emily the Strange. Mai's drawings are soft, but her speaking voice is blunt. Laura is an opposite girl (a Harvey tradition, not a gothic one), seemingly sweet but inside, closed.

Mai's comics have a lot of illustrations. Which is to say, in addition to the comics — panels through which a sequential story passes — there's lots of narration rendered simply as a journal, text on the page, and then a page with a complimentary illustration. The portraits of Carmilla and the eerie drawings of cat eyes in the night are more Vic Herman than Charles Schultz.

The illustrations serve a dynamic storytelling purpose, isolation that amplifies a moment or a feeling so that it stands out against the regular flow of the story. Sometimes Mai embellishes on Laura's reflections, the visual storytelling buds opening to blossom, and sometimes she leaves the moment as it is, two people and four bare walls, letting the space on the page fill with intense emotion instead of filigree. Soft is a diary, so we get comics when stuff happens to Laura and other approaches for how Laura feels about things, or pictures them. 

We do see Mai stepping away from a normal comics storytelling style and incorporating other combinations of words and text. But! Soft keeps it very low-key, using an aesthetic I love that calls back to the balance of comics and prose found in zines. Hand-lettered public diary entries side-by-side with biocomics, be still my heart. Equally zine-ish are the many apartment floorplans, rendered with detailed care but no concern for measurements or proportion (only story). That turns out to be quite the clever idea, to show you the place you're thinking about. Even if there's nothing in the panel but a person, you have an idea of the space they're occupying.

If you can picture where it's happening in the back of your mind, then the space establishes a life outside the comic. The apartment exists in addition to the stuff you've read that happened in it. Laura is a homebody; Tintin, she's not. You get the sense that the days before meeting Carmilla bled into each other, and Laura was comfortable with that. It makes her feelings for Carmilla that more precious and different. The schematic of the home Laura shares with her father becomes an illustration of means of egress.

I like how the elements of Laura's life are made conceptually concrete without relying on realism in the art. Mai builds visual depth with intellectual contrast: a panel with nothing but a person in it is anchored to a sense of physical space; the drawing of a girl floats on the page next to a description of how she makes the diarist feel.

Soft as I've read it is actually the "Director's Cut" version, a rare chance in comics where the artist gets to revisit and tighten up their work — not to change it or fix it, but to add what was missing. Why? Mai confesses in the backmatter and on the dust jacket that this work is her favorite she's done. Though many pages were added and edits made to the original dialog and existing art as Mai saw fit, I can't tell where the 2015 book ends and the 2024 one begins.

And though Mai is best known contemporarily for brash and satirical comics about herself, Soft isn't strictly speaking about her. Mai retells Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story that predates Dracula by a quarter century. And Laura's best friend Jun-Mei means she gets to be in it anyway. But making Soft about Laura and not June made it so the story was no longer bound to the truth of See You Next Tuesday, Mai's comics confessions, and popular persona. Vampires! Not true! But the feelings are true. They're more real than anything in the book. The moments when the read gets undeniably real and heartbreakingly true are when Jane speaks to you without having to be present on the page. 

Soft is available now. To procure a copy of your own, click this.

Peow2 / $15.00
Written and illustrated by Jane Mai.

Check out this preview of Soft, courtesy of Peow2: