After boy met boy in a crowdfunded graphic novel set in a British grammar school in 2018, hearts began to flutter and tills started to ring around the world. This week, the second season of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper landed on Netflix. In December, the author, who scripted the TV adaptation of her winsomely affirmative queer love story, will publish the fifth book in the series.
Though many people above a certain age may be unaware of it, Heartstopper is a cultural powerhouse. Popularised through social media channels, it helped to keep bookshops afloat through, and after, the pandemic, while spreading a feelgood spirit among its young, multimedia-savvy, readers, to whom it has sold 8m copies. Whether it would have become so huge in happier times is a moot point. But the phenomenon casts a revealing light on rapidly changing relationships both in the real world and in the interlinked media industries that represent it.
Ms Oseman, who is now 28 years old, made her debut in 2014 with a young adult novel, Solitaire. At a time when young adult publishing was fixated on fantasy, she wrote school-based coming-of-age stories. Her first protagonist was a girl, Tori Spring, but in the background were Tori’s gay younger brother, Charlie, and his boyfriend, Nick. After two attempts to develop their story through conventional ebook novellas, Ms Oseman decided its episodic structure would better suit a webcomic, whose fans crowdfunded a print edition. In 2019, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher, and went on to become the top selling graphic novel in a single year in the UK, for adults or children, since records began.
The turning point was the launch of a live-action television version in the spring of 2022, which reached the Netflix top 10 in 54 countries. The novels were promptly reissued with TV spin-off covers, extracts of the script in the back and an invitation to read more in the original webcomic, which now has more 124m views. On TikTok, the #heartstopper aggregator this week was racing toward 11bn views.
The lucrative spinning wheel of television, print books and online fan sites was in evidence at this summer’s Hay festival, where Ms Oseman was interviewed in a packed marquee of fans high on Heartstopper ice-cream (the erotics of ice-cream cones is a recurrent theme). Her interviewer was Jack Edwards, a content producer for platforms including YouTube and GoodReads, and who was one of five “thinkers in residence” at the festival.
There are two stories in every book, Mr Edwards said earlier, in a session exploring the online life of books: “One is the black and white story and the other is your experience of it.” This apercu says a lot about the hold of Heartstopper on the BookTok generation. Bursts of cute graphics flutter at moments of high emotion around characters who, barring the occasional embarrassing hickey, are protected from harm or shame by a strong code of social justice. The stories also appeal to a crossover audience raised on an earlier era of school dramas, in which hickeys were known as love bites.
It is almost a badge of honour that the books have fallen foul of anti LGBT+ censorship laws in Florida and Hungary. They are a success story built on fans who simply want the experience of feeling good about themselves.
