Love Ignited Returns in 2027 With Jen Bartel, Jordie Bellaire and Strange Romance Stories

Love stories are returning to Ignition Press in a notably offbeat form. Love Ignited 2027, the second annual volume of the publisher’s romance anthology, is expected in February 2027 as an approximately 48-page collection of new short comics. Jen Bartel is set to provide both the cover and an original story, while the wider group of contributors will take romance well beyond the conventional meet-cute.

The announced material includes love stretched across time and space, a seafaring story about parental love and grief, a painful breakup inside a specialty bookstore, an alien matchmaking program built around interplanetary dating, and a romance involving circus cyclists. That range is central to the project’s identity: it is a romance anthology, but one that treats the genre as a broad emotional category rather than a single kind of relationship or setting.

Its predecessor, Love Ignited 2026, established the basic approach with stories that moved from ocean depths to outer space. The new volume appears designed to continue that flexibility while changing the creative lineup and premises. Readers interested in more upcoming comic-book projects can also follow Godzilla Versus Everything, IDW’s planned 2027 four-issue event.

A romance anthology with room for the unusual

An anthology is a book made up of multiple self-contained works rather than one continuous narrative. In comics, that structure allows each team to approach a shared theme with its own characters, visual language and tone. Here, the shared subject is love—but the announced stories suggest a deliberately expansive definition.

Molly Mahan and Matthew Dunn are attached to a tale of transcendental love across time and space. Maxine Zilkenat’s contribution centers on parental love and grief in a seafaring setting. Michael W. Conrad and Marley Zarcone will examine a difficult breakup through a story set in a specialty bookstore. Morgan Hampton and Noel Kelly are taking on alien matchmaking and interplanetary dating, while Jordie Bellaire has a romance story involving circus cyclists.

Those setups matter because they give the collection multiple points of entry. “Romance” can mean desire between partners, but it can also mean connection, separation, family bonds, longing and loss. The project’s stated mix embraces all of those possibilities. A breakup story and a grief story are not simply detours from romance; they can explore what relationships leave behind, and how people make meaning of them.

There is also a useful practical benefit to the short-story format. A reader does not need prior familiarity with an ongoing series or a large fictional universe to follow an anthology entry. Each premise can make its case quickly. That can be appealing for readers who recognize a particular contributor, as well as for people looking for a compact book with a variety of moods instead of a single extended plot.

Who is involved in Love Ignited 2027?

Bartel has a dual presence in the book: she is providing the cover and contributing a new story. Covers have an outsized role in anthologies because they must represent a whole collection rather than a single cast or storyline. With themes ranging from intimate heartbreak to cosmic connection, a cover creator is effectively helping establish the volume’s first impression while the interior material branches out in several directions.

The rest of the announced participants are Mahan, Dunn, Zilkenat, Conrad, Zarcone, Hampton, Kelly and Bellaire. The publisher has associated several of them with prior work: Mahan and Zarcone with Shade the Changing Girl; Dunn with What’s the Furthest Place From Here?; Zilkenat with Bugbarian; Conrad with In Bloom; Hampton with Green Lantern; and Kelly with The Dogsitter.

Jamie S. Rich is editing the 2027 collection. An editor’s job on an anthology extends beyond arranging pages. The role can involve shaping the overall balance of material, coordinating contributors, and making sure that stories with different tones still feel purposeful when read in the same volume. Rich’s earlier work on Shade the Changing Girl connects him with some of the new anthology’s contributors, including Mahan and Zarcone.

How the 2027 volume follows the first Love Ignited

Love Ignited 2026 was the first anthology from Ignition Press. Its contributor list included Chris Burnham, Dani, Joëlle Jones, Patrick Horvath, Morgan Beem, Rosa Ekedal and Olivia Dufault, among others. That edition was framed around the idea that people may go to extremes for the person—or creature—they want, and it used stories reaching from the sea to space to test the boundaries of a Valentine’s-season romance book.

The 2027 edition retains the seasonal placement and the willingness to make love strange, but its announced stories point to a different set of emotional questions. The interplanetary dating premise can use science-fiction distance as a lens for finding connection. The specialty-bookstore breakup story has a more grounded emotional starting point. The seafaring piece brings family grief into the collection, and the time-and-space story takes the scale in the opposite direction.

That variation is an important distinction from a themed book whose entries all repeat one plot device. The theme here supplies cohesion, while the individual creators supply contrast. A story about circus cyclists does not need to resemble a story about a matchmaking show for both to fit. Their common ground is the way their characters navigate affection, desire or emotional attachment.

What “creator-driven original series” means in this context

Ignition Press has been publishing creator-driven original series since the middle of 2025. In broad terms, creator-driven describes work built around original material from its creative participants rather than comics dependent on a pre-existing corporate superhero or entertainment property. That description helps explain why an anthology such as Love Ignited can place unrelated concepts alongside each other: its entries are positioned as new work by the participating creators.

The publisher was co-founded in July 2024 by Eric Gitter, its CEO; Filip Sablik, its publisher; Rich, its editor-in-chief; and Jeremy Haun, its creative director. By returning to Love Ignited for a second year while expanding its 2027 slate, the company is using the anthology as a recurring space for standalone work alongside its original series.

What readers can reasonably expect—and what remains open

The supplied details establish the broad creative direction, a roughly 48-page length and an expected February 2027 release window. They do not specify a precise release date, pricing, format beyond the page estimate, a full table of contents, or further plot details for the individual stories. Those gaps are worth keeping in mind, especially with anthologies: contributor lists and story descriptions explain the appeal, but the final reading experience will depend on page counts and the editorial sequencing that have not been detailed.

Still, the information available gives a clear picture of the intended experience. This is not being positioned as a collection narrowly focused on one style of romantic fantasy or one relationship model. Its stories are expected to range from personal to cosmic and from painful to playful. The presence of grief and difficult separation suggests the book is willing to treat love as complicated, while alien dating, time-spanning connection and circus cyclists preserve the eccentric energy that defined the first volume.

For readers, that makes Love Ignited 2027 a potentially accessible snapshot of several creators working under one emotionally broad prompt. For the publisher, it also turns Valentine’s season into a recurring occasion for short-form comics that can be heartfelt without being predictable. The book is expected to arrive in February 2027.