by Michael Whitney
The key to love stories is that they are never -- without exceptions, never -- about
love. Love is an autoclitic. I can say that I love this band, that I love my
family or that I love my pet fish, and I mean something different each time I say
the word. Love has no intrinsic meaning as a word on its own; it hinges on its
context.
In psychology, it's pretty much accepted that attraction is rooted in similarity.
There are some exceptions to the rule, but my layman's understanding is that we love
what we know, what's familiar or what is most similar to ourselves. Studies have
shown that people find their friends more attractive and tend to find strangers more
attractive when they're mingled with friends.
Buy that or don't, but the underlying theme is this: what we "love" is more about
our internal traits than the qualities of the object of affection. That's why love
stories are not about love. Jane Austen helpfully put the true subjects of her love
stories in their titles. "Pride and Prejudice" is the most popular example.
Mainly, though, love stories are about the lives of the protagonists, who they are
and who they want to be. "True Loves" by Jason Turner and Manien Bothma is no
exception.
True is a hip young girl who owns her own used clothing store, a consummately hip
job, if you have to have one. She dresses in hip, outrageous outfits and goes for
wild nights on the town with her hip, outrageous friend and store employee.
Inexplicably, True is dating Dirk, a computer tech with heavily unhip signifiers,
including: glasses, short hair, sport coat and genuine enthusiasm for his boring
corporate job. The comic doesn't offer any handles on the relationship that would
explain how it began, but they've been going out for ten months and True's terrified
that he'll propose. It's possible that they're simply changing in different
directions.
It's the age. I'm guessing the characters are in their mid to late twenties.
You're usually finished with school. You've usually been working for a few years.
You're looking around and wondering, is this all there is to life now? It's the
quarter life crisis, and for most people the answer is the next step that they know:
marriage, home and kids. That's the route that True denies she wants, and probably
the way that Dirk is heading. For the terminally hip, though, the answer is
probably to run the other way. (Hipsters have the worst quarter life crises, by the
way.)
The story begins when True runs into Zander, who's on the opposite end of the
spectrum from Dirk. If Dirk's on a direct line to a suburban plot and 2.5 kids,
then Zander isn't heading anywhere in particular. He's quirky: wild hair, grocery
store job and boundless goofy enthusiasm. He's not settling down into "grown up"
life, not slowing down or becoming more staid. As she gets closer and closer to
Zander, True is deciding something about herself.
If you looked at it purely as a choice between fun guy and boring guy, you might
wonder why she doesn't just tell Dirk to get lost right away. She doesn't.
Instead, she sees Zander on the side and keeps him a secret from Dirk. He's boring,
but we learn from a scene where Dirk gives True a CD that he is thoughtful, he cares
for her and he knows her. He's a stable, known quantity with a predictable future
track. Zander is new, unknown, and quirky. Dirk is safety and Zander is
excitement. If you can't understand why this is a tough choice now, then wait a few
years.
I see the internal conflict mainly in the facial expressions that Turner chooses,
and in the facts of the story. Even as she gets closer and closer to Zander, True
still holds on to Dirk as well. She says she wants to break up with him, but when
her friend asks if she's going to do it, she says, "Eventually..." Turner draws her
with a guilty, uncertain look. Throughout his work, he does a lot with a few simple
lines to evoke character and setting, and his art has a Charles Schulz quality in
that sense.
Turner's style is most reminiscent of Andi Watson books such as "Dumped" or "Slow
News Day." On first glance, the art seems rough or sketchy, but in reality it's
deftly minimal and expressive. Like Schulz, it looks easy because he's skilled at
making it look easy.
Most of Turner's other comics on his Web site are side-scrolling. "True Loves" runs
vertically down the page, one panel per line. The horizontal spacing of the panels
is either deliberately random or designed. If there's some significance when a
panel is placed left or right, I can't decode it. It seems to be simply a random
arrangement, but that serves the feel of the story as much as a design.
The panel structure isn't accidental or haphazard, even if it is
random. Since this is the Web, we can see exactly how it's done.
A peek at the underlying HTML reveals that spacer graphics are used to position the
panels at exactly their horizontal alignment. It would have been far simpler to
choose one of the three default positions -- left, right or centered -- and tag the
panels to those spaces randomly. In fact, there are a number of easier ways to code
the panels' horizontal spacings, but none of them would create as many variations,
and the comic would lose the "organic" feel of the random alignments. The constant
different variations give the comic a feeling of energy, like a seismograph or a lie
detector running down the page. It makes the tense scenes more tense and the
broader, slower moments more striking.
That's the other very good trick that Turner has up his sleeve: removing panel
borders on some images. The missing borders can give the panels a "big" feeling,
probably because your eye traces the edges of the image to find its boundaries.
Since space equals time in comics, it also slows the reader's pace. Turner uses it
effectively as punctuation. Whenever a moment is meant to linger -- for pacing or
emotional impact -- the panel borders are gone and your eye wanders the art. Of
course, the technique wouldn't be as effective if not for the larger spacing in
Turner's vertical scrolling format.
There's no information on the site about who plays what part in the collaboration
between Bothma, who is listed as a "co-writer," and Turner, but the art is precisely
tuned to the script. Whenever True is around Zander, Turner draws her with shading
high on the cheeks. She's flushed, stimulated by this new person.
The heart of "True Loves" is the excitement of new love and the difficulties it
creates. Turner and Bothma capture exactly the feeling of a new connection and the
slow erosion of an old relationship. There's another theory about love that says
love is self-expansion. When we look for someone to love, we look for people who
will allow us to expand ourselves and grow through them. It's held forth to explain
why opposites attract. If it's true, it also means that relationships die when they
restrict us from growth or when they start going somewhere we don't want to
go.
"True Loves" is not about love; it's about what True loves in her life. Right now,
what she loves is being young: hip clothes and nights on the town. That drives her
toward Zander for now. But security is just as tempting in its own way, and the
story, like all of ours, is still in midstream. There may be reversals in store.
