Fantasy
The Fantasy That Lets Itself Be Drawn: Tom Gauld and Contemporary Romantasy
On 25 October 2026, The Guardian Books publishes a Tom Gauld cartoon about romantasy. Starting from that minimal gesture, a reflection on contemporary fantasy: what the label names, how the twin engine of world and bond works, and with what criteria to read it without noise.
By Pedro J. Pérez ·
A cartoon in the books section
On 25 October 2026, The Guardian Books publishes a Tom Gauld cartoon titled “Tom Gauld on the modern romantasy novel.” That is all the record offers us: a cartoonist, a date and a subject. And yet the fact carries weight. When graphic humour chooses a literary genre as its material, it is because that genre has already established a repertoire of gestures that the reader recognises without needing explanation.
The cartoon is neither a review nor an essay: it is an image that condenses reading habits. Its existence indicates that romantasy has ceased to be a niche phenomenon and become a shared language. It is worth stressing the limit of this note: we are not commenting on the drawing, whose content we do not have, but on what its mere appearance reveals about the place of fantasy in today’s literary conversation.
What the word romantasy names
Romantasy is a contraction of romance and fantasy, and it serves to designate novels in which the fantastic world and the love relationship share the weight of the narrative. It is not an absolute invention: fantasy has always housed sentimental plots, and the romance novel has resorted to exotic or marvellous settings. The new label does not create the hybrid; it makes it visible and gives it a name that readers and booksellers can recognise.
What is interesting, literarily, is that the fusion demands two simultaneous competences: the construction of a world with its own rules and the management of an emotional bond that sustains the tension over hundreds of pages. When both work, the result is not a minor genre but a demanding narrative machine. When one of the two fails, the story suffers immediately, and the reader notices.
The mechanisms: world and bond
Fantasy is defined by the presence of the marvellous as a constitutive part of the world: invented geographies, systems of power, lineages, magic with rules. Romantasy adds to that edifice an emotional engine: the relationship between two characters who discover each other as the world is revealed to them. That double movement—knowing the world and knowing the other—explains much of its effectiveness, because it allows information and desire to be meted out in the same narrative gesture.
Hence coherence is decisive. If magic exists, it must cost something; if there are factions in conflict, their interests must be intelligible. Romance, for its part, needs credible obstacles and not mere misunderstandings. The reading pact is double: the reader asks for wonder and asks for a bond. A novel that satisfies only one of those demands may entertain, but it can hardly endure.
Parody as a form of respect
That a cartoonist should satirise a genre is, in a sense, an involuntary tribute: only what has a recognisable form is parodied. The cartoon works as pocket literary criticism, points out conventions and returns them to the reader transformed into complicity. Those who love fantasy can laugh at its tics without renouncing it; in fact, recognising them is a way of reading with more attention and less naivety.
The risk appears when irony turns into disdain and the genre is reduced to a consumer label. There it is worth being precise: the existence of formulas does not invalidate a narrative mode, just as the existence of bestsellers does not invalidate the realist novel. Fantasy includes pastiche and works of enormous formal ambition. Confusing a part with the whole is a reading error, not a critical conclusion.
Criteria for reading romantasy without getting lost
For those approaching it for the first time, there are useful questions. Do the rules of the world have consequences, or are they decoration? Does the romance transform the characters, or does it merely accompany them? Are conflicts resolved through decisions or through coincidences? Does the pace sustain the length? These are simple questions that separate a memorable reading from a mere succession of scenes. Applying them does not require erudition: it requires attention to what the text does, not only to what it promises.
For those coming from classic fantasy, romantasy can be read as a variation rather than a deviation: the same impulse to invent worlds, with the focus placed on intimacy. For those coming from the romance novel, the demand lies in the logic of the world. And a general recommendation: distrust the noise of novelty and the counter-noise of contempt; both say more about the market than about books.
Conclusion: a genre that lets itself be drawn
Let us return to the cartoon of 25 October. Its documentary value is small and its symbolic value considerable: it confirms that romantasy is part of the contemporary literary landscape to the point of deserving a humour page in a newspaper’s books section. Living genres let themselves be drawn; dead ones are only cited. Fantasy today lets itself be drawn and lets itself be discussed, which is another way of being alive.
None of this exempts us from demanding standards. The best defence of fantasy is neither indiscriminate enthusiasm nor defensive irony, but attentive reading: distinguishing what endures from what is forgotten, celebrating what is achieved and naming what fails. An ingenious cartoon and a well-constructed novel share the essential: both trust that the reader knows how to look. That trust is the only pact that matters.
Sources and references
- Tom Gauld on the modern romantasy novel – cartoon — The Guardian Books — alternativa literaria