Like most of the people who will probably end up reading cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s Scenes From an Impending Marriage, I wasn’t part of the work’s original intended audience.
The version I’m reading is the little, five-by-six-inch hardcover that Drawn and Quarterly published and is selling for about $10. The short, connected stories that make up the work were apparently originally produced as a wedding gift from the real Tomine and his real fiancée to the guests at their wedding.
The final story in the slim volume, before the epilogue, features the couple trying to decide what to give as a gift, and once Tomine pooh-poohs a few ideas, his fiancée suggests he make “a little comic book…you could do a bunch of short strips about us getting ready for the wedding!”
The story ends with the Tomine characters sighing, and saying he’ll think about it.
Personally, I’m glad he decided to do a bunch of short strips about them getting ready for the wedding, and gladder still that I was able to get a copy, even though I wasn’t a guest at the wedding (So, uh, thanks Tomine! And an extremely belated congratulations to you and your wife!).
The book consists of about ten vignettes in all, generally unfolding in nine-panel, perfectly square grids, with the characters in medium-shot and the action scrolling across the tiers at a leisurely pace. The almost-mechanical perfection and level of detail in Tomine’s most recent graphic novels, Shortcomings and Summer Blond, is replaced by a looser, breezier style, and an accompanying lighter tone…to the artwork as well as the subject matter.
Between each story, there’s a full-page cartoon that suggests something mediocre from the funnies page of your local paper, often with the leads appearing in the big-headed style seen on the cover of the book, and appearing in a Family Circus-esque circle (One of them, at least, seems like more of a New Yorker cartoon).
There’s a story about deciding who to invite and who not to invite to the wedding, the names of most of the people discussed scratched out (“Boy…people would really be appalled if they heard some of these discussions!” the Tomine character says). Another looking at reception venues. Another about whether to acknowledge each family’s cultural heritage, and how. Another about choosing a DJ.
Anyone who has been through the experience of planning a wedding—or been close to people planning one—should recognize many of the humorous situations that arise.
I feel weird applying words like “sweet” or “cute” or, most especially, “darling” to a Tomine comic, and those are adjectives that swirl around—so does “precious,” but that one seems to have too-negative connotations to be applied. As trying as so many aspects of the modern wedding celebration can be, there’s no real drama or fireworks or angst or conflict in the couple’s experiences; the humor is sly and observational, and the fact that they’re so in tune with one another and in it together is fairly heart-warming.
The comic reads a little like a piece of evidence that these two characters are in love and belong together; if I were a part of that original audience, I imagine it would have me tearing up at a reception, since even though the characters are complete strangers to me, I felt delighted seeing them so happy together.
The cover says “a prenuptial memoir by Adrian Tomine,” and while he may have drawn every line and lettered every letter himself, this is their memoir as much as his memoir. That in and of itself can inspire a sort of joy, as does seeing an cartoonist of Tomine’s caliber do pretty much anything for 50 or so pages.
December 16th, 2011 at 4:42 am
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