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Heated Rivalry was arguably the biggest surprise of 2025... unless you were Ngozi Ukazu. The graphic novelist responsible for DC's lauded YA adventure Barda could've told you that there were acres of gold in those queer hockey romance mountains, particularly because she'd been there since 2013. Yeah, a full twelve years before Shane & Ilya were skating their way into viewers' hearts, Ukazu was introducing the internet to the tale of figure-skater-turned-hockey champ Eric 'Bitty' Bittle in the YA queer romance saga Check, Please!...

And now, she's heading back into the rink.

Ukazu was recently a guest at BookCon 2026 in New York City, where she appeared along with authors Rachel Reid, Emily Rath, Bal Khabra, Stephanie Archer, and Kate Cochrane for the ice-rink-romance themed panel You Had Me At Hockey. After the panel, Popverse was fortunate enough to sit down with Ukazu and hear all about what's next for in the Check, Please! storyline - a new title called Check, Please! year Five.

"Check, Please! Year Five is the continuation of the Check, Please! story as it is," began the Flip author, "Check, Please! has been a duology for the last five years, but the only way that I could write another hockey-focused book would be to center it on characters of color and also a character who's from a different socioeconomic class from those hockey players."

"I am working on the book now," Ukazu explained, "I am drawing it, and just the excitement from the readers as I'm drawing… I'm posting thumbnails to my Patreon and Discord and people are like [screams]. I'm like, 'What the hell is going on?' But people are just activated. The hockey romance upswing has activated people. And I'm like, so I'm so excited for it to come out."

Naturally, we couldn't just let Ukazu drop the bomb that there would be new lead players in Check, Please! Year Five, so we followed up to ask - if the story is moving away from protagonists Bitty and love interest Jack Zimmerman, who would co-captain the next season of the icy sports drama?

"The characters that we're going to focus on," the Orion author told us, "Are actually characters from the comic that we know and love. They're Dex, Nurse, and Chowder."

(For those readers who are newer to the world of Check, Please!, Ukazu is referencing William Poindexter, Derek Nurse, and Chris Chow, respectively.)

"They were these underclassmen who are now in their senior year," she continued, "And they are tasked with this problem. The big question that these characters are asking, and that I also want to ask the readers, is, 'What does Samwell Hockey mean to you?' Which is - 'We are this accepting team that just won a championship, but what do we want to be? What do we want our legacy to be?' And these three characters are interrogating that in a dynamic way."

And because Ukazu is as generous an interview as she is talented a creator, the Barda writer/artist left us with one more (and hopefully not last!) hint at what's to come. 

"Just to tease where that question lies and why they confront it," Ukazu concluded, "There might be a new player, who is a player that we've never seen before. How do we bring them into the fold in a way that is true to what Samuel Hockey has done in the past?" 

Get ready for what's next with our list to upcoming comics and how to buy comics at a comic shop.