In a medium filled with superheroes, supernatural, mystery and other grandiose stories, Getting It Together is telling a sitcom-styled dramedy of a group of friends in their 20s that hang out in daily life set-ups. What first comes to mind reading this comic is TV series like Friends, Sex and the City, Queer As Folk, Insecure or especially Broad City. With the feel, precious cover style and sarcastic humor of a Netflix binge comedy into it, this comic brings to the table discussions around mental health, consent, queerness and race. It fits right there with romcoms, sitcoms and drama LGBT+ stories wrapped up in lots of cringy humor and some real-life anecdotes. But in Getting It Together, the medium matters, and the fact of telling a story like this in the page reveals something more, something different.
The art has a costumbrist and realist style often used for graphic novels that makes you connect with the characters. It’s also noticeable Jenny D. Fine is a designer as well as an artist, and she masters the transitions between different places, scenarios, people, moods, using composition and design for every scene. Combined with a comfy, familiar but also kind of smoke-y punk-ish coloring by Mx. Struble, the art constantly works towards telling you right of the bat that it’s showcasing real life-alike drama and comedy. In this vein, D. Fine knows how to emotionally touch you and cleverly takes the licenses that comics medium offers in showcasing emotions, like exaggerating some reactions of the characters, cartoon-izing this realist style in some shots, or even putting extra-narrative elements, like punk lightning coming off electric guitars or violet clouds that represent doubts and anxiety. This all works towards feeling like polished sketches of real people done in the middle of bar conversations, with the emotional extra of pun(k)tual exaggerations. You can feel there’s a lot of concept work behind this style, and it flows with the words brilliantly.
It’s important to add that the work behind this book seems the work of heavy conceptualizing and drawing from broad personal and creative experiences for both Sina and Omar, and therefore it gets into some serious issues from the beginning, like the main break-up and open relationships, or consent related to racist stereotypes, while also making me want to see different takes on some of these heavy themes moving on in the story. Grace has a wide experience in Slice-Of-Life comics like Not My Bag, Nothing Lasts Forever or Self-Obsessed. For this last one, he created and wrote a webseries with guest stars like Amber Benson or Laura Silverman, where some themes that are in this comic were pretty central (like relationships, mental health or music). Getting It Together feels even moreso like an evolution of the work of all of these wonderful artists towards a fictional world that could easily look like a real one.
