Word: beland
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TIME.comix launched one year ago with a review of a love comic, so let's try making that an annual tradition, what with Valentine's Day just past. Issue #2 of "True Story Swear to God" by Tom Beland (Clib's Boy Comics; 40pp; $2.95) continues a series that may be painful to read for some - like me. Sub-titled "The true story of a real-life romance," the series chronicles the author's meeting and courting of the love of his life. It can be pretty brutal stuff for the lonely and bitter, yet hopeful too, told...
...Beland's drawing style enhances the light and happy tone. Rendered in black and white, his fat lines are all soft curves that form simple but recognizable caricatures. The expressive figures have an animated look that may remind you of Warner Brothers cartoons. The eyebrows float around the character's heads like caterpillars dangling from invisible threads. Beland also keeps the layouts nicely varied but always easy to read...
...second issue introduces the problem: Lily lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Tom lives in California, 15,000 miles away. After a single encounter they must consider how much it meant and whether the distance between them is surmountable. For anyone noticing Beland's Puerto Rico mailing address on the letters page, though, the suspense is ruptured. But the reason you read "True Story" is its vulnerability. It has completely let its guard down, as I suppose you need to do to fall in love. So we see Tom visiting his parent's grave and talking to them, and when...
...even though Beland shows us his tender side, I wish for more depth. What of the sex? So far it has none, since I guess there wasn't any up to this point, but surely he thought about it? It's an awfully chaste book. We've had some incredibly personal comix about relationships that go wrong, including Julie Doucet's "Dirty Plotte," David Chelsea's "David Chelsea in Love," and most excruciatingly, Joe Matt's "Peepshow." An artist who shows something that goes right needs to work harder to find the (inner) conflict. For people like me, "True Story...
...Beland's "True Story Swear to God," has an almost unheard of agenda in comicbooks. It aims to be a "feel-good" work. Lord knows we could use more of that in our lives, but it's a pretty low bar for art. Certainly as a work of fiction this series could be easily dismissed as impossibly cute and unbelievable. Yet it happened. So instead it has the charm and delights of a real fairy tale...