Grand Slam Romance

Married creators Hicks and Oosterhous pitch a playful chronicle of the romances and rivalries of a queer softball league. The star is Mickey Monsoon, nonbinary heartthrob and ace pitcher for the Belle City Broads. The Broads are all set to win the year’s tournament with their five-time MVP on the mound, but Mickey is thrown a curveball when their crush Astra Maxima, a licentious catcher with magical powers, joins the competition. Astra’s prowess as a player, both on the field and in the bedroom, proves hard to beat; off their game, Mickey resigns, until a secret squad is formed with the sole purpose of stopping Astra. Captaining that team is Wolfgang, a six-foot-plus German butch who dated Astra when the two of them were students at the same Swiss softball academy and is bent on her own lovelorn revenge. Oosterhous’s exuberant, confectionary artwork plays well off Hicks’s rakish script, with the duo changing it up between the madcap puerility of sports manga and unadulterated prurience of an Apatow romp to sometimes rousing—if occasionally cornball—effect. Fans of A League of Their Own should slide head-first into this series. (May)