By Will Lawler
After a recent reading slump, I picked up Emily Henry’s Book Lovers and was delightfully proven wrong about every gripe I had with the contemporary romance genre. Henry’s prose wasn’t flavourless; the banter wasn’t cringey; and the spicier scenes served to complexify her characters rather than becoming the novel’s whole focus. Since then, I’ve consumed Henry’s entire body of work, as well many other romance novels. Happy Place makes me happy; Funny Story is funny; and People We Meet On Vacation does feel like a vacation from the fiction I typically read. However, even the queen of the literary rom-com hasn’t been spared from the one publishing trend driven by BookTok and Instagram that I’ll never learn to love: cartoon cover designs.
These covers depict minimalistic figures of men and women on brightly coloured backgrounds that lack dimension and personality. Their style can be copied and pasted with a simple title change to magically suit any other light-hearted romance novel. They also often completely neglect one of book design’s major functions: to balance between subtly representing the text and utilising relevant market trends. Unfortunately, neglecting the former has proven to be lucrative. But is it doing more harm than good to the book industry?
Cartoon catfishes
For contemporary romance, cartoon covers are visually approachable to a wide variety of readers. As Kayleigh Donaldson for Paste Magazine writes, ‘[These books] seem universally appealing, non-threatening, and unabashedly feminine. For many readers new to romance, an illustrated couple seems far less intimidating to a first-time reader.’ They cater to existing readers of the genre, while also enticing new readers simply by relying on their marketability. But as almost every reader knows, buying a book solely based on an aesthetic cover often results in unmet expectations upon turning the final page; catfishing is no longer exclusive to dating apps.
We’ve often seen this happen with romance novels like Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid, where editions with covers featuring headless sets of wet abs or lingerie are repacked with cartoon illustrations to make them seem more accessible, but disguises their smuttier content. Similarly, the standard edition of The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood is advertised as light-hearted, swoony and wholesome, but contains some truly spicy stuff. While objectively less complicated than Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and its history of sexualised covers – misrepresenting its genre and morally grey plot – cartoonifying contemporary romance often risks putting books into the hands of the wrong readers. We’ve all walked past the YA section of a bookstore and seen one or two novels that make us do a double take at its shelving. No parent wants to gift their pre-teen a copy of Icebreaker because they thought it was a cute coming-of-age sports novel, only to later discover how salacious it really is.
Hiding in plain paper
The rebranding, from lewd to chaste, can be especially beneficial for queer authors of contemporary romance though – particularly for those living in Trump’s disunited States – given the cartoon cover offers protection against their work being banned. It misrepresents the text inside in the best possible way, like the simple brown paper wrappers that historically once disguised more risqué covers held in libraries during the 1920s.
Alternatively, misrepresentation for the sake of remaining accessible seems an unfair compromise that, while helpful, is one straight authors have rarely encountered. As Venessa Kelley, illustrator of popular queer fiction, told BookTrib, ‘I want to show people in love and that love is accessible.’
Does the ‘prestige’ cartoon cover exist?
The cartoon cover also seems to limit contemporary romance’s critical potential. When looking at Booker nominated titles it becomes clear that prestigious literary organisations embrace love stories, but only when these texts inexplicitly engage with romance tropes, either through their writing or, more often, their marketing.
Upon release, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day were critically recognised as masterful romances, but they still looked like novels worthy of a Booker nomination. Their covers highlighted the novels’ broader themes, rather than centred around their love stories. They favoured muted colour palettes and minimalist photographic elements. Even the cover of Atonement today depicts its narrator as a young girl in greyscale sitting on a staircase—soulmates Cecilia and Robbie are nowhere to be seen.
The Booker Prize positions their nominated novels as having ‘a love story at their heart.’ They don’t slap it front and centre. ‘Love’ is a theme, but ‘romance’ is too genre-specific. The bestselling UK edition of Sally Rooney’s Normal People seems to be the exception here. While its cover, featuring a man and a woman in a sardine tin, adopts a familiar cartoon illustrated style, the design subtly highlights the text’s deeper concerns, abstracting them accordingly. Normal People is presented as literary fiction, despite adopting conventions often found in contemporary romance.
A beige future
Emily Gibbs for The Boar sums it up best: ‘Cartoon book design may foreshadow a future where all artwork is devoid of human creativity, even down to the words included within the pages.’ When I pick up two novels with a cartoon cover, I feel as though I’m being told by publishers that there’s inherently no difference between them; I’ve found myself rolling the dice on whether I’ll get sweeping prose and multifaceted characters, or a 400-page raunch-fest that would make a sex therapist blush.
Every time a reader picks up a romance novel with a cartoon cover, they’re taking a risk. For an already scrutinised genre, it’s a shame that many readers won’t make it past the first page. Cartoon covers are here to stay, but I hope that in the future the trend starts to show some more personality, reflecting how engaging and multifaceted contemporary romance can be.
Will is currently completing his Masters of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at The University of Melbourne. When he’s not reading or bookbinding, you’ll find him cohosting the comedy film and TV podcast, In the Fleapit. He can also spot the culprit in any Agatha Christie novel!
Cover photo by Jack Kirby on Wikimedia Commons. Free to use under Public Domain.
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