Angel Love is an eight-issue comic book series created by Barbara Slate and published by DC Comics in 1986. It tells the story of the lead character Angel Love, a rollerskating waitress at a New York restaurant who is an aspiring cartoonist. Her circle of friends include Cindy, another rollerskating waitress, Wendy, her aspiring actress roommate, and Everett, her musician neighbor. Despite the cute cartoonish artwork, Angel Love deals with serious issues such as drug use, abortion, critical illnesses, and incest, making the series confusing to market. The series ended with a special that concluded the events that the final four issues were dealing with, the story arc of Angel finding her long-lost sister Mary Beth.
Angel Love provides examples of
- Alliterative Name: Maureen McMeal.
- Apology Gift: In the special that closes out the series, when Lola decides she's had enough of Everett when he skips out on her and leaves a goodbye note for him, he shows up at her door with an apology gift: a necklace with a gold musical note pendant. She likes it enough to forgive him.
- Bags of Letters: In one issue, where Wendy is seeking out somebody she could date through the personals, Angel opens her mail slot and dozens of letters all addressed to Wendy just pour out of it! Angel takes them to Wendy and dumps them all on top of her.
- Big Applesauce: The main setting of the series.
- Blackmail: How Angel gets Mary Beth to save their mother, by threatening to expose her Maureen McMeal identity. Angel keeps her promise of silence, but the information is still leaked to the press, causing Mary Beth to drop out of the political race and out of Angel's life forever.
- Blind Date: Wendy has one with a child!!!
- Cardiovascular Love: The Heart Symbol used in the title on the cover. The surname of this Protagonist Title is Love after all.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Everett's girlfriend Lola.
- Deadpan Snarker: Everett's got a pretty sharp tongue. Luckily for him, Wendy's antics give him a lot of material for him to work with.
- The Ditz/Dumb Blonde: Wendy Thornball.
- Exploding Closet: Angel's apartment mail slot explodes with letters that were all addressed to her roommate Wendy when she put out a personal ad looking for a date.
- Fairy Companion: Halo, the Guardian Angel fairy that comes to life when Angel draws her.
- Food Slap: Angel gives one to a customer who tries to hit on her while upsetting the woman he's currently with.
- Functional Addict: Don the bartender snorts cocaine and appears to have his life under control, but Angel sees that drugs have control of him. Angel refuses to take drugs and eventually refuses to date him until he cleans himself up.
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Cindy becomes pregnant, and is considering an abortion. Angel is against her friend having one, but Cindy is so adamant to have an abortion that Angel joins her at the abortion clinic for moral support...until Cindy suddenly decides not to have an abortion and to marry her boyfriend instead.
- Holy Halo: In the title on the cover, for the Angel part of its Protagonist Title.
- Interrupted Intimacy: Angel Love does this to Everett and his girlfriend Lola twice whenever she enters her own apartment.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Everett resembles Michael Jackson of the early 1980s.
- No Sparks: An entire issue is dedicated to the title character trying to see if there's any chemistry in the relationship she's having with a guy she's been seeing or not.
- Obfuscating Disability: Rose the bird. She does get injured by a cyclist while Wendy teaches her how to fly but continues to have Wendy pamper her long after her foot heals.
- Only Sane Man: Between being a Cloud Cuckoolanders Minder for the ditzy and gullible Wendy and being the rational side to Angel and her questionable decisions with her love life, Everett's got it rough.
- Parental Incest: Angel finds out that her sister Mary Beth left home and changed her name to Maureen McMeal due to the shame she carried of Angel and Mary Beth's father sleeping with Mary Beth, and is even ashamed that she actually enjoyed it.
- Protagonist Title: Full-name version.
- Released to Elsewhere: Inverted in this series: Angel was told by her mother that her father died and went to heaven. In truth, as revealed by Angel's sister Mary Beth (later renamed Maureen McMeal), Angel's father left the house after the mother discovered that he was sleeping with Mary Beth, and is possibly still alive.
- Talking Animal: Angel Love's apartment has talking cockroaches.
