Will Ares is a successful divorce lawyer to Hollywood celebrities, currently helping his client, movie producer Evans Beatty, divorce his second wife. Gigi Averelle is a wedding planner at her business Goddess of Love, and is organising the wedding of her client, teen film sensation Carrie Cartwright. Cartwright is marrying Beatty. Will is a hopeless romantic, but Gigi is a romance cynic and does not believe in true love. The pair meet through their clients, whose impending wedding is being threatened by scandals. Will issues Gigi a challenge: if Beatty and Cartwright manage to get married, Gigi will go on a date with him. If the couple split before they can be married, Will must publish a public list of all the divorces he has finalised.

Beatty’s first ex-wife, Alison Queen, is cast as Cartwright’s mother in her upcoming film Crown Princess. Will and Beatty visit Alison to question her involvement in the movie, but she insists she isn’t interested in interfering in their marriage. However, photos leak of Beatty hugging Alison later that day, and when Cartwright sees them, she is distressed and disappears. A call from an out of town hotel suggests Cartwright fled to her and Beatty’s regular holiday destination, and Will and Gigi drive there to find her. The hotel staff say Cartwright departed earlier, but as the two rooms are a standing reservation under Beatty’s name, Will and Gigi stay overnight at the hotel. The pair kiss on a late-night walk on the beach.

The next morning, Gigi is hung over and embarrassed about her actions the night before. When Will drops Gigi off at her store, Cartwright is outside addressing the media; she declares she will retire after Crown Princess is released. However, when they accompany Cartwright home, they discover vulgar graffiti on her house about her upcoming marriage. Nonetheless, the wedding day arrives, and Beatty and Cartwright are married in a beautiful ceremony. Will and Gigi realise Alison was organising the scandals and harassment so her public kindness towards Cartwright would endear her to the media and guarantee an even bigger box-office success for their upcoming film together. Gigi and Will spend the rest of the wedding flirting and dancing, and the next morning, share breakfast at a nearby diner. They agree to officially start dating in the future, and Gigi admits Will won their bet. Crown Princess is a resounding success.

Love Wars is a graphic novel of the romance genre which playfully reimagines Aphrodite’s love affair with Ares as a dating game in the professional world. As the title suggests, in their professional lives, Will Ares and Gigi Averelle embody aspects of Ares, God of War, and Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Sexuality. Will facilitates personal “wars” between couples by organising their divorce, while Gigi plans weddings. Will is sent a threat in the form of a decapitated toy ram, possibly as revenge for facilitating a past divorce; he associates ram’s horns with being a symbol of Ares (p. 25). Similarly, Gigi’s business is called Goddess of Love (p. 83). However, in their own lives, these expectations are subverted; Will is the hopeless romantic who believes divorce opens the path for true love, and Gigi believes the “happy beginnings” of love are not worth the “bitter endings” (pp. 62–63, 74). The graphic novel thus also subverts the gendered norm of a woman yearning for a romantic partner and a man too busy with work for commitment — for most of the story, Gigi is more invested in growing her business than romancing Will.

Women who are positioned against love are associated with stereotypically loveless female figures. Beatty’s second ex-wife is referred to as “that gorgon”; because he thinks she is a female monster because she is trying to wrangle money from him through their divorce (p. 24). Later, Gigi tells Will that she accepts his bet “just to see your belief in fairy tales turned to stone”, aligning herself with a gorgon (p. 37). She later jokes that Will set up the bet because he “want[s] to be the hero that melts the Ice Queen’s heart”, again characterising herself as powerful yet unfeeling (p. 69). At the wedding, Gigi wears a flowing pastel blue and cream dress, evoking the image of a waterfall and alluding to the fact that she has developed feelings for Will; she has, in fact, melted. When the protagonists meet Alison Queen, she is at a costume fitting, wearing the traditional outfit of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland: a regal red dress decorated with heart symbols, with an elaborate collar and the miniature red crown (p. 40). 

The illustrations are realistic yet colourful, and feature strong lines to mark facial expressions. The most elaborate illustrations are four prominent dresses: Alison Queen’s Queen of Hearts dress, Gigi’s party dress at the wedding, Cartwright’s wedding dress, and finally, Cartwright’s princess costume from her film. The elaborate style of these dresses — of which all but Gigi’s resemble the shape of a ballgown — enhance the romantic mood of the novel. While the workplace setting suggests this graphic novel is intended for an adult female readership, it is also accessible to older teenagers interested in a romance between adult characters.

Edition used for the entry: 

Jamie S. Rich and Megan Levens, Ares & Aphrodite: Love Wars, Portland: Oni Press, 2015, 168 pp. 

ISBN 9871620102081.