Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed, Liz Prince

The packages were stuffed with stuff. My Top Shelf package was, mostly, all Kochalka stuff that was on sale in celebration of his song, Hockey Monkey, being selected by Nickelodeon.

The ironic thing is that I got WIll You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed from Mayhem, and not directly from Top Shelf. Shame on me.

Liz Prince is, indeed, of the same ilk of James Kochalka and Jeffery Brown; she draws autobiographical comics. That's the only real connection.

Here's a graph:

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Angst Median Love.

Now, let's place the three cartoonists on the same graph.

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Brown Kochalka Prince


See, where Kochalka lives in the middle, equally reveling in angst and happiness of his life—comics about fights with his wife, Amy along side comics about making out with his wife, Amy. The stress of the Nickelodeon deal next to comics of funny things his son, Eli, says. Kochalka is living life and loving it, no matter what happens. Kochalka's the guy you read when you're happy.

On the ends of the spectrum, there are Brown and Prince. Jeffery's comics are centered in his unsure ways—his anxieties are as equally aired on the page as his daily problems, whether they be love related or otherwise. Brown's the cartoonist to read after a break-up.

Liz, though, proves with this collection that she's the master of collecting the tiny moments of love and transforming them into an equally bizarre and delectable pallet. Each comic centers around her relationship with her boyfriend, Kevin. Every page you're expecting something monumental, and each page you realize that things like boners and special kisses are monumental—Prince has, somehow, created the perfect sounding board to point out the importance of the mundane. Love is, in reality, made up of these strange little moments when you make your lover make a funny sound during sex or find the special spot on their lip that is yours and yours only. So Prince is the cartoonist to read if you're in love.

There aren't many autobiographical cartoonists that I can really get into; the Top Shelf stable pretty much hits it for me—and I'm glad Prince is now a part of that pie.

Hell, even my own diary strips aren't that interesting to me.