WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME IF I WET THE BED #1

Relationship Vignettes

By Kurt Amacker     January 13, 2006

Liz Prince's WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME IF I WET THE BED? offers a non-traditional narrative that, fortunately, doesn't focus on urine nearly as much as the title suggests. Rather, Prince presents a series of vignettes portraying the small, personal moments between a young couple in love. Far from "Where is this relationship going?" she instead focuses two pages on such things as the couple rubbing their cold feet on each other in bed. She fills the entire 71 pages with those moments as the lovers tickle, tease, bicker, and chat candidly about their sex life. The book's title comes from one of those scenes, which remains, thankfully, free of actual bed-wetting. It's more of a rhetorical question.

Obviously, WYSLMIFWTB? sits on a shelf far away from JLA and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN in your comic shop. It's probably on same shelf as that BONE trade you eyeballed last week. Prince's rough, cartoonish art conveys the feel of a comic strip charmingly drawn in someone's notebook writ large. While it looks raw, it's also touching and realistic when it conveys the less dramatic, film-worthy moments of a romance. Here, you won't find lovers cheating or throwing engagement rings back to each other. Rather, they poke each other while driving, pretend to make their tea kettle talk, and ambush each other in the bathroom. It doesn't make the reader laugh so much as reflect and relate.

I won't bring out the "You read too many superhero books!" thing to recommend this book. If you only like capes and tights, this probably won't do it for you. However, I would implore you to give it a shot. Here we have a raw, insightful, practically homemade mini-comic from Liz Prince and Top Shelf Productions. If you like your love real, give WILL YOU STILL LOVE ME IF I WET THE BED? a try.

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