It can at times be a rotten, depressing world out there, and I'll admit that at least daily I worry about the world that I've brought my daughter into, one that is full of greed, hatred, ignorance and any number of other seemingly insurmountable problems. It's nice to occasionally get a reminder that there's good in the world too, and not to get too overly dramatic (too late!) but True Story Swear to God serves as a regular dose of what's good in the world. Beland started out telling the story of a seemingly too good to be real romance story that was all the more sweet and powerful for actually being true, and has now migrated into telling the story of that relationship as it developed, which has expanded to include basically the changes that all of us go through in life. True Story Swear to God has always specialized in using one specific story (the story of Tom and Lily) to tell stories that resonate with all of us, and that hasn't changed since the focus shifted somewhat from the romance to Tom's decision to move to Puerto Rico to be with Lily.
I still remember well the frustrations I had when I moved to New Jersey to work in New York. I was homesick for Austin all the time, I missed my friends, I missed my family, I missed my favorite restaurants and while there were definitely things I enjoyed, the culture shock frustrated the hell out of me. When the time came, I packed up and left as fast as I can. Of course, I got to take my wife with me... if she'd been settled into New York, we would have stayed. So I can relate to Tom's frustration with the adjustment to Puerto Rico, from the frustrating inability of his clients to pay for the work he's done to the sudden near-absence of English to his English-speaking ears to an appalling incident of stupidity that just pushes everything that has happened to a boiling point. The events are almost 100% different, but the feelings are the same. That can be applied to almost anyone reading True Story, I would suspect.
What's amazing is that despite sharing the frustration and anger so well, True Story Swear to God doesn't leave me as emotionally spent or frustrated or depressed as, say, watching the evening news does these days. Because Beland has an antidote for the things he goes through, and he shows that as well. That antidote is often named Lily, and the story of how she got on the radio and told her listeners about what had happened, and the outpouring of support that came in response, is every bit as powerful as the negative forces that hit Tom in this issue. More powerful, actually, because they are a positive force, and it's easy to be negative, to tear something down or react out of ignorance and anger, but much harder to reach out to someone you don't even know and offer support.
Which isn't to say that Lily is the only character important to Tom in this book. Or that the entire story is about their romance or about Tom's adjustment to living on the island of Puerto Rico. There's a short, two-page sequence where Tom talks to his brother Joe on the phone. In this exchange, Joe equates the trials and rewards of fatherhood with Tom's desire to be a cartoonist, and it's... great. These events are all viewed through the filter of Beland's experiences, and so I don't know if Joe ever really said the things attributed to him in this issue exactly in this way, but if he did, the guy's a genius. It's such a succinct and effective summing up not just of what it means to be parent but of what it means to know something is important to you and do what you have to in order to get it where it needs to be.
I'm mostly a trade paperback guy these days. I just don't have the space for a lot of single issues, and almost everything I really like gets collected anyway, so I tend to gamble on the trade paperback collections. I know, or at least I'm pretty certain, that True Story Swear to God will probably continue to be collected in trade paperbacks, and that I'll get those too. But I'll still be buying every single issue that Beland puts out, because this book continues to be a shot of pure, positive, real emotion every time it comes out.
