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THE NORM MAGAZINE - THE 12 STEPS TO MARRIAGE
Mildly Recommended (6/10)
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The Norm.com Publishing
Writer/Artist: Michael Jantze
Price: $4.95 US/$5.95 CAN |
I really enjoy The Norm, Jantze's daily online strip about work, life and marriage, but I have to admit that this magazine, the story of how the strip went from being about a guy with friends to a married guy with friends, seemed weaker than most of the Norm that I've read. Perhaps it's because Norm's experiences getting married were so far from my own that I couldn't really relate, or perhaps it's because the story seems to have several points to make, and it's a little all over the map, so it never makes any of them very effectively. At any rate, while there's fun to be had in these pages, the story is a little scattered, and the commentary on relationships a little specific, to be as enjoyable as an average issue or strip of The Norm.
Though the book is titled "12 Steps to Marriage," Jantze diverges from that structure pretty quickly. He instead decides to hit on some of the common experiences, including the bachelor party, deciding how to handle duplicate stuff, proposing and telling the family, and though he'll throw in a numbered step every now and then, mostly it's seems less considered than all that, instead jumping around to the various tasks that come up when getting married. In my experience, this is pretty true to how planning a marriage feels, anything but orderly, but it might not be the strongest structure for a comic.
One of the disappointing things about this book for me was the way that Reine comes off in all of this. Perhaps it's just because my wife is the most understanding wife in the world, but in just about every way, this book paints Reine as the bad guy. She's constantly ruining Norm's fun (casting a cloud on his bachelor party), ruining his life (getting rid of all his stuff) or telling him what to do in some sort of frantic, crazed way. My guess is that it's meant to be endearing, but I found her rather annoying, and that's not generally the way I see the character. A little more balance, maybe seeing things from Reine's point-of-view as we sometimes have in the strip, would have balanced the scales considerably.
However, despite my complaints, there are certainly some fun gags to be had here. Norm's sort of weird distance from reality makes for some funny moments, especially his "exit interviews" with the vacuum cleaner and his conversations with his inner child at the wedding. Though I didn't experience the cold feet and questions that seems to be a staple of wedding fiction, it's a time-honored tradition based in most peoples' reality, and I thought Jantze had a neat take on it with the pre-existing story tradition of Norm's inner child.
I've enjoyed The Norm in what I think are both incarnations: pre-marriage and post-marriage. However, while there are some entertaining moments in this story of how Reine and Norm went from friends to husband and wife, I think I preferred the way Jantze originally told the story, skipping over all of this stuff and getting to the more humorous married life of the two of them.
This comic book was not among this week's new releases.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review. |
