Comic Crush Saturday: Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

My first Alice Oseman book was Radio Silence, and I never actually read it. 😬

It came to me as an ARC in 2016, one of the first I ever received, passed along by another blogger back when I was still figuring out what book blogging even was. It sat on my shelf doing what unread ARCs do. But trying to figure out who Alice was led me to Nick and Charlie instead. I had no idea, holding that ARC, that I was about to spend the next decade with two boys in a school hallway, or that their story would end up running alongside my own.

Heartstopper came into my life while I was still working some things out about myself. I didn’t plan for a webcomic about first love to become part of that. But it was there, while I figured out my own queer discovery, and there’s a particular kind of comfort in watching characters learn to trust who they are while you’re doing the same thing off the page. I don’t think I fully understood at the time how much that would matter later.

Ten years is a long time to hold onto anyone, fictional or not. And now we’ve said goodbye twice. First on the page, when the series wrapped, and then again on screen, when the show ended too. Both goodbyes hit differently. The book gave us the ending Alice intended from the start. The show gave us the ending in the medium that introduced Nick and Charlie to millions of people who never would have found the comic on their own.

I keep coming back to that ARC, the one I still haven’t read. It’s strange that a book I never opened is the reason I got ten years with characters I did read, over and over, until I knew their story as well as my own. Saying goodbye to them means saying goodbye to a piece of that decade too.

I wouldn’t ever be ready for it and yet…watched it the day it dropped.

(it was perfect)

Heartstopper: Volume Six (Heartstopper, #6)

by Alice Oseman
on July 2, 2026
Goodreads

Boy meets boy. Boys become friends. Boys fall in love. The final installment in the bestselling LGBTQ+ graphic novel series about life, love, and everything that happens in between.
Everyone in school knows Nick and Charlie. Everyone knows they’re going to be together forever. But Charlie’s busy with his bid to become head boy. And while Nick is preparing to leave for college, he’s starting to wonder who he’ll be… without Charlie.
Contains discussions around mental health and eating disorders, and sexual references.