Everybody’s talking about hockey romance with the success of Heated Rivalry, a six episode series from Canada that presents a very steamy relationship between two male hockey players. Attractive stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie have been every where over the last few weeks, including last night’s Golden Globe awards, providing the heat for these chilly winter days. The program is based on Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series, and they have have become instant best sellers since the streamer took off.
OF course, if you’re into comics, the first thing you think of when you hear “gay hockey romance” is Ngozi Ukazu’s Check, Please!, a webcomic that started on Tumblr before setting Kickstarter records, and then getting a publishing deal at First Second, and launching Ukazu’s career into all kinds of directions, including DC Comics and The New Yorker.
It’s a sweet PG story about former figure skater Eric Bittle who joins the hockey team at Samwell University and gets a crush on the tough captain, Jack Zimmermann. As the story unfolds, a rivalry turns to friendship and then love.
As we mentioned, Ukazu has been busy with all kinds of non-Check, Please! related stories for quite a while (last year, her YA graphic novel Flip was one of the best books of the year). But with everyone going crazy for gay hockey romance, Ukazu recently announced that Check, Please! will be back in 2026, as she has one more story to tell.
Which is why I’m thrilled to announce that a brand new volume of Check, Please! will be serialized in 2026. Dozens of new comics, exciting update drops, your favorite characters with brand new storylines, and characters you’ve yet to meet.
Hello, Internet Land—SMH is coming home.
This fifth year of Check, Please! will be filled with shenanigans, drama, hockey, pies, Haus parties, and a new message of acceptance that is near and dear to me. And it’s been brewing over the last year and half! But with the latest boom in queer hockey stories, I figured, hey! ¯\(ツ)/¯ Here’s another one to look forward to. :)
Marginalized athletes still face harmful bigotry, and for this reason, queer sports stories are more important than ever. I love Samwell hockey and how each of you has embraced this roster of athletes.
Ukazu would be silly not to hit the ice again with her own series, but you may be asking yourself, who had the first shot on goal? Which came first, Check, Please! or Heated Rivalry?
Check, Please! debuted in 2013, and Reid’s series launched in 2018, so Ukazu scored the first point. However, gay hockey romance has been a thing for a while, and both undoubtedly drew inspiration from some of the same elements – there is indeed a whole subgenre of gay hockey romance books and fanfic. As I always say when writing about such things, this is NOT my fandom, so I may be missing some of the nuance here. My understanding that Gay Hockey Romance fandom got a huge boost on Tumblr, the microblogging platform which flourished from about 2010-2014 and provided a home for all kinds of ships and slash. The subgenre also took hold on AO3 around that time, including RPF (real person fandom). AO3 lists more than 13,000 entries of Men’s Hockey RPF, going back to 2004. So this is not a new phenomenon – and it’s also been popular on BookTok for a while as well.
As for why gay hockey romance…you’re going to need someone more versed in the fandom than me to explain that.
Vanity Fair took a stab at looking at the whole phenomenon’s popularity:
Taylor Capizola, the general manager of romance bookstore The Ripped Bodice’s original Culver City location, has long been enthusiastically recommending Reid’s series, the original trade paperback editions of which bore a cover with two ripped male torsos, bare above the waistlines of their hockey pants, canted suggestively toward one another. It’s been a bestseller at the store since its release in 2019, but the 60 or so copies Capizola had backstocked ran out within two days of the show’s premiere on HBO Max in late November.
Libraries, too, saw interest in the series explode. OverDrive, the e-book and audiobook lending service used by many American public libraries (the Libby lending app is a subsidiary), shared data with VF showing that there was a whopping 698 percent increase in activity—that includes checkouts, tags, and hold requests—for Heated Rivalry alone from 21 days after the show’s premiere, compared to 21 days before. Compared to this time in 2024, the book has seen a 10,534 percent increase in activity.
One reader quoted in the VF story gives a familiar reason for why women like yaoi/BL/slash to begin with:
“As a woman, you have a lot of societal external noise about the way that a woman’s supposed to be,” she says. “Whether I want to or not, I naturally am going to compare myself a little bit to the female character, whereas with a male/male [pairing, I don’t].”
Plus, she says, “I love seeing men being vulnerable.”
As for why hockey……daring to venture my own, extremely hesitant theory, I’d guess that it has something to do with the way hockey players are aggressive but graceful on the ice, totally covered up while playing, and contrasting the rough, gap-toothed action with tender romance has that frisson that readers crave. Or something like that. I’ll shut up now.
Anyway, Comic Book Bin has more on Check, Please!, and Book Riot has a reading list for those who crave more queer hockey romance including one featuring female hockey players.
And in the meantime, let’s celebrate the return of Check, Please!, a beloved comics classic whose time has come again.
(h/t to SKTCHD for alerting me to Check, Please! coming off the bench.)
