posted 06-30-2003 04:58 AM               

If you read one autobiographical humorous romance comic this year, it should definitely be True Story, Swear to God. Not only because it’s one of the few autobiographical humorous romance comics out there, but because it’s funny, touching, and even inspiring. Beland takes a story that’s almost too good to be true – his own – and quickly makes the reader connect with the real people who have lived that story.

Beland is a cartoonist and page designer for a California newspaper when he receives an invitation to an all-expenses-paid media event in Disney World. On his last night in Orlando, he almost goes to sleep early, but then decides to head to catch a ride to a Stevie Wonder concert. At the bus stop, he meets Lily Garcia, a radio personality from Puerto Rico. The two strike up a conversation and wind up talking long into the morning. Once home, they continue to call each other; over the course of those phone calls and a few all-too-short visits, they fall in love.

It’s a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale that makes the title wholly appropriate. Fortunately, Beland is a skilled storyteller, and the too-good-to-be-true elements of the story are balanced by the tragedies that he’s endured and by his own nagging sense of doubt and anxiety. Rather than scoff at the unlikeliness of his story, I found myself quickly rooting for Beland to find the happiness that finally seemed within his grasp. There’s an emotional honesty in the storytelling that’s critical to making this kind of autobiography work.

I called this a humorous romantic comic, but it’s far from a romantic comedy as most people understand it. The humor doesn’t come from the wacky hijinks that ensue as our hero and heroine stumble around and finally realize their feelings for each other – we know Tom and Lily are a good couple by the end of the first chapter, and more importantly, so do they. The humor is more situational, slice-of-life stuff, with a conversational tone that makes it feel like Beland’s an old friend telling you about the wacky thing that happened to him that day.

Beland also makes a lot of the humor work through pacing and contrast; he definitely has a strong command of comics’ particular storytelling strengths. Comics can effortlessly switch location back and forth between panels, without even the sense of disorientation that film cuts would produce, and Beland puts that to use in this tale of a long-distance relationship. In one sequence, Tom and Lily send each other copies of their favorite books – she sends Paulo Coelho’s The Chemist, and he sends Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. In one panel, Tom sits reading The Chemist, with multiple caption panels that convey the rush of emotions he’s feeling. In the next panel, Lily sits reading Dark Knight, with a single thought balloon that says “Bruce Wayne needs therapy.” The ease with which Beland makes the visual transition seem like it’s not a transition at all strengthens the effect of the change in verbal tone and rhythm, which gives the joke that much more oomph.